


How Fare the Gods?

by Ohdotar



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Also I love my nerdy pacifist Asgardian Elliot Randolph so much, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Asgard, Asgardian Magic, Avengers team - Freeform, Berserker Loki, Canon-Typical Violence, Destruction Duo fits better, F/M, Family Issues, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Loki Has Issues, Minor Jane Foster/Thor, Moral Ambiguity, SHIELD, Science Bros, Stark Tower, Steve is a sad depressed artist war veteran why does no one notice this, Stockholm, Talk about religious or nationalist extremism I guess, The Tesseract (Marvel), Thor Is Not Stupid, Thor Is a Good Bro, Thor and Loki as villains in the loosest sense of the word, Thor and Loki come to Earth to retrieve the Crown Jewel of Asgard, Worldbuilding, idk if Erik Selvig is Swedish or Norwegian in canon but he is Swedish now, it might become a thing or not, it's savage okay it's freaking Sparta now
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-16
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2018-10-06 04:18:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 48,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10325456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ohdotar/pseuds/Ohdotar
Summary: "So, what have we got?""Too many civilians on this case.""Two crazy superhuman criminals who claim to be gods.""...a headache.""A team unequipped for dealing with this?""Actually, I was thinking... what is the Tesseract? Really. Why do they want it so bad? Why dowewant it so bad?"or alternativelyThe story where aliens found us first and they're kinda assholes.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I just really love useless drama and canon divergent scenarios so here you go. The Avengers are a recently established group to tackle international superhuman crises, SHIED still stands, and they get to meet two illegal, violent aliens.

“We are now broadcasting live from the Old Town of central Stockholm, where just hours ago an abnormal light phenomenon was followed with what numerous crowd sightings claim to have been two grown men in odd clothing, appearing from the sky.” 

“I’m standing here on the sunny Strömbro bridge and behind me you can see the Swedish Royal Palace and the House of the Parliament, both of which are situated near today’s odd happenings. Locals are unwilling to call it anything, but we’ve already heard all explanations from neo-nazi vandalism to angels of the Lord.”

“Locals are confused, and authorities have closed off a safety perimeter near the water, around the smoking remains of whatever it is that happened here. Earlier we managed to record a few interviews from bystanders, but right now the Swedish police forces are not letting media have a closer look.”

 

“Två män, jättehöga män, och båda hade på kläder som var typ rakt ut ur Sagan om Ringen. Plötsligt stod de bara där i mitten av stan!”  
_Two men, really tall men, and both were wearing something straight out of the Lord of the Rings. Suddenly they just stood there, in the middle of the city!_

“Javisst var jag där när de kom, det är sanning! Jag vet vad jag såg! Den ena hade en stor hammare och han sa att den var Mjölnir och den andra skrek nåt om Asgård!”  
_Sure I was there when they came, I’m telling the truth! I know what I saw! One had a big hammer and called it Mjölnir and the other screamed something about Asgard!_

“Ropade om något de kallade för ädelstenen, men jag kan också vara helt ute, jag vet inte vad det var för faktiskt.”  
_They kept shouting about something they called the gemstone, but I can also be a little dazed right now, I’m not really sure what it was._

“De bara försvann, sprang mot Slottsbacken, och den mörkare man skrek något om gudarnas guld och tjuvar och sådana saker. Helt galna, både av dem.”  
_They just vanished, ran towards the Slottsbacken hill, and the darker man shouted something about the gold of the gods and thieves and things like that. Completely crazy, both of them._

 

/ / / /

 

All SHIELD personnel involved in Phase Two are to stand by ready to action or evacuation of the project.  
The situation will be played off on crowd hysteria and bystander effect.  
Agents in Sweden and Northern Europe, _this is not a drill._

 

/ / / /

 

It had been meant as a safe place for storing the jewel. Nothing ever really happened on Midgard, nothing of importance at least. The mortals bred and died like rats in a barn and there should have been no reason for them to start actually working with the stone they were gifted. It was on lease for safekeeping. Not a toy of their own.

The sun was setting over Stockholm and the high cliff they stood upon looked to the north, towards the old centre of the settlement. Thor was looking down over the mortal city and the sea around it, bulky and garishly coloured ships littered all around the coast.  
The wind was cool and there was rain in the air, and the grassy cliffside they stood upon was damp and cold. Sloshing under their boots. The neighbourhood behind them was largely painted yellow and made of stone or mortar, but they couldn’t really recognise any of the buildings. The tall, grey towers below looked to be even newer, harsh and bulky, uglier than dwarven huts.

There was a small frown on Thor’s face and he looked like he was in deep thought, blue eyes raking the cityscape absentmindedly. Loki wasn’t sure if it was for their advantage or not. Thoughtful Thor was usually a bad omen, the still before a storm.

“Do you remember when we were last here, brother? When there was a little lake in the midst of those... new houses behind us?” he asked slowly and conversationally, stepping a bit closer to Thor’s right and trying to search his eyes. Still an arm’s length away.  
“They hadn’t yet even dug the road,” he added with an amused scoff, looking down at the coastal route where once was stone.  
“Just a solid hill with a few odd dwellings there on the western side. It was a few centuries ago, was it not. Maybe three or four. Sif and Hogun were here with us,” he said, tilting his head slightly towards the direction he spoke of. Thor nodded slowly and took a deep breath, but didn’t look up at him or say a thing. His shoulders were tense, but he didn’t seem angry. Loki didn’t know what to think of it.

“Do you think that they still call that island Skippholmr? I tried to listen into a chat earlier, but they can’t even pronounce the names of the waterways anymore. At least not in any a way Alltongue wouldn’t translate over. I couldn’t make out a thing -”  
“Can you shut your mouth, Loki?”

Oh.  
So it was one of those days then.

“And what, may I ask, has crawled into your boot? I haven’t seen you with eyes as dark as they are now since… I can’t remember,” Loki drawled, reclaiming his own personal space another step further away from Thor’s. The tense huff of air Thor let out when he whirled to look at him, finally, was a small drawback in the victory.  
“We are not here to explore Midgard, is that clear to you?” Thor asked, forcing his voice to stay low so he was growling rather than roaring. Loki bit his tongue to keep from answering. Of course he wasn’t going to strike up a conversation with useless mortal men or run off like a child. Why would he? Was Thor still mad at him for the jötun ambush he’d had nothing to do with? It was last year.  
“You do not talk to unimportant mortals or make unneeded noise - we need to reclaim the Tesseract, and now that the fools playing with it know that we are here for it, we wait,” his brother continued, stepping right up to his face with a raised hand, and Loki was already bracing himself for a fist to his nose. 

There was no punch, but no more words either. Thor let out a long sigh that had his massive shoulders slumping, and patted Loki’s upper arm gently, then his cheek in a way that could have been a slap if it would have been any harder. Loki tilted his head and dodged the affections.  
“You slithering little snake,” Thor laughed and now his hand was a fist, hitting Loki’s shoulder gently. Loki grabbed it firmly in his hand when he moved to punch him again, twisted the arm away from his direction and searched for the pressure point under Thor’s wrist. Thor only laughed louder when he dropped his arms.  
“What is the matter with you, you... dull block of stone!” Loki hissed. “Father ordered us here to do his bidding and retrieve the stone, we scared off a few mortals in the Old Town and you’ve said nothing since! I did exactly as was the plan, we both did, we stated that we were gods and now you want us to wait. For what, Thor? What are we waiting for?”  
“For the nightfall, idiot.”  
“ _The night is falling!_ ” he yelled in Thor’s face, whisking an arm towards the western sky and almost hitting Thor’s eye in the process. Thor stopped laughing and blocked the arm from his face. His expression quieted again to one of odd closedness. Thor was rarely closed off.

“Loki, I worry for you. And for myself as well, Midgard has changed a lot and we can’t just… reach a lord and demand the stone back.”  
“Do you think that we can’t kill a few mortals if need be?”  
“No, but I worry for -”  
“For me? For yourself as well? Yes, you just said that,” Loki snapped, but he found the words dying on his lips when he understood what Thor’s pleading gaze was all for.  
Of course.  
He shut his eyes for a moment, letting out a long huff of breath, and tried to get his words out with several aborted hand gestures before he could get them to make any sense. Thor made a sound like he was going to start speaking up again, and keeping him silent was a fairly good motivator.

“If this is once again about the staff, Thor, I swear in Hel’s name,” he forced out with as little teeth grinding as he could, “I shall use it to beat _you_ down instead the next time I take it in my hands.”  
“I hope that you shan’t,” Thor grimaced. “And I also hope that you would pick another weapon,” he said, and Mjölnir hung on his belt in a very clear statement of what Thor preferred. He just liked to crush and burn things. No finesse, no _seiðr_.  
“Why should I? ‘Tis a good one and I like using it,” Loki replied with a sunny smile he knew would disappoint Thor even further.  
“No, you don’t,” Thor said, and the glare he shot Loki was a warning one, “You don’t have to use it, Loki. I know that even without it you could best most warriors easily.”  
“How do you know anything about it? You have never tried,” he insisted, ignoring the let down expression on Thor’s face. It wasn’t his business, and Loki had the right to do whatever he liked. He followed the same procedures as any _úlfhedinn_ would, so Thor really didn’t need to treat him like he was going to break. He had already proved that whoever tried would be broken first.  
(And he did like the staff, he did. It hurt and it seared and it burned him to ashes, but it also purged his head like no wine or weed or witchcraft had ever done. And it felt better and better every time. It was better than the air in his lungs.)  
“I don’t need to resort to dark magic, I have Mjölnir,” Thor snorted. The following pause when his brother understood what he had spoken was all Loki needed to gesture towards the hammer and smile.  
“And now you have an answer as well, for I have not been gifted with such a weapon. A ‘safe’ one.” 

The lights of the city cast reflections on the still waters, and the traffic of mortal men had slowed down a bit. The oddest thing about Midgard, at least in the wintertime here in the north of it, must have been the darkness of its nights. But in the summer, right now, the evening skies were a starless canvas of pale, waning blue. Like a cheap mockery of Asgard’s shining heavens.  
“To arms, then. You do know what we are going to do now, don’t you?” Thor asked with a snort of laughter.  
“Yes. Hold back as much as possible,” Loki said. His own returning smile died when he added: “And there’s no going home before we have the Gem.”  
Loki ripped apart a thread of reality to summon the staff into his hands. Before it was even fully materialised, branding his hands and his arms with the white-hot rage that rushed through him, he whacked Thor to the ribs as hard as he could and dragged him through the step that brought them across three islands.

 

/ / / /

 

_“We the gods have arrived!”_

Cars were screeching to a halt and people were climbing out of them in a hurry. University folk from the Department of Astronomy were running around, screaming. A man who approached the intruders was crudely thrown to the ground with a slap of a hand. 

Named after the viking goddess of love, Freja or Vanadis, the Vanadislunden Park was a lovely vast area of green. It had never seen such chaos before.  
It had been a nice night of celebrating successful research and the ending summer, until a loud thunderstrike ruined it and everything went to hell. Recordings by foolhardy bypassers were quickly spreading and the national television arrived. And left quickly when the van was nearly hit by a lightning bolt.  
Police forces arrived but their words meant nothing. Their bullets, when they eventually fired, could hardly scratch the armour of the two targets. One was killed by a hammer to the head, another had his neck broken in one swift move. They fell back.  
After them a series of unmarked vehicles arrived. A helicopter. A SHIELD quinjet. Other cars and forces quickly disappeared.

_“Come now, surely there has to be some form of challenge on this realm!”_

The street on the north side of the park was on fire by the time first agents dropped down.

 

/ / / /

 

 _“Sir, confirmed two hostiles. We need immediate backup, Rogers is not enough manpower to stop them. Send Stark._  
_Repeat, Rogers is not enough. The hammer and the staff channel energy and power their attacks.”_

Steve had never in his life really been scared of anything. Not for his own death, anyway.  
Sure, anxiety about his place in life, fear of losing his loved ones and trying to survive through the war (and only now starting to understand that it was over, swapped for an endless net of politics and secret agencies and whatnot) had always been present. But even the horrible deeds of Schmidt hadn’t really scared him senseless. They had just been absurd, horrible, incomprehensible and disgusting - something that needed to be treated with caution but also seen as the idiocy it was.

The pale guy clad in leather who looked to be about the same age and height Steve himself was, maybe a bit thinner and taller, was one of the two silly-looking attackers. However when Steve threw a punch at his face, and the man hardly even budged or grunted, just turned his head slowly right back in position to look at Steve like he’d just said something very rude and childish… That was a moment when he was feeling pretty scared, yeah.

_What are you?_

It was the loudest thought Steve had before he got the air punched out of his lungs by the long staff of solid metal that, for a brief moment, glowed red like a heated oven. Staring at the end of the spear in his face, Steve could have sworn that the fiery patterns spread themselves onto the man’s skin like brands. It was gone when he blinked.  
The guy was a hurricane of movement, clearly comfortable in his height and agility. Where Steve tried to hit he slipped away, and wherever Steve aimed to block he was already there, moving like an animal. Steve was happier than ever that he actually had a shield to fight with. Against a spear of all weapons it was a lot better than any bullet-proof armor, and after this he was not going to be convinced to use anything else anymore. Never.

“Romanoff, do you see this?” he snapped into the comms when he dodged the attack and blocked the next one with his shield to gain better footing, and damn, the attacker had a good swing stored somewhere in his shoulders.  
“Yes, watch out for the civilians running across the east end of the road!” she replied tensely. Steve hadn’t even had time to worry about civilians. He was too busy slamming the edge of his shield into the side of his opponent’s face.  
“Some help here?” he barked again. The sound was a crack of metal against something hard that really shouldn’t have been a skull if it sounded like that. A small stumble was all the time that Steve had to prepare for the oncoming lunge.  
“Stark is on his way, you have to -” she started to say, but Steve lost the rest of it under a lung-rattling, beastly _scream_ of anger his opponent let out. 

And he lunged again. Steve brought his fist to his nearing jaw and aimed for his knees, but the long spear blocked his way and almost tripped him. The next second it was painfully hitting his back. At least he had one hand free for attacking when his opponent had both on the spear.  
Even if it was about his only advantage, he didn’t really want to dwell on it.

“Brother!” someone yelled. Steve fell back a few steps and saw the bigger one of the attackers storming towards them from where he’d beat up the three agents that had accompanied Steve on the ground.  
“Thor!” the dark one called back, a little out of breath (a small victory, but it was better than nothing - at least it was possible to exhaust these enemies) and it was the perfect window for Steve to ram his whole weight against the man’s chest to topple him in a flash of long limbs. He threw the shield against the blonde - who at least slowed down to dodge it - and turned to resume the fight when it ricocheted back to his arms. 

He got no pause though, just a bony fist to his nose and another hit of the staff to his side.  
“Will you bow down?” Steve heard someone bark as they were both clambering to their feet. It took him a moment to understand that the angry command masked beneath a smooth question was actually coming from the same man than the earlier grunts and yells.  
“Not likely,” Steve spat and grabbed the man's arm to use the momentum of his new attack so he slammed bodily against the shield.  
The hoarse gasp and the sound his neck made when Steve yanked the shield up towards his throat were not pretty - and the job was a difficult one with the tall, stiff collar the man wore. The opponent fell on his knees for half a second, and Steve slammed the shield against his head as hard as he could. The spear dropped on the ground in a heartbeat of slackened grip.

Steve lost his only advantage. And he saw it the moment he locked eyes with his opponent. They were blown close to black and his pale cheeks had gone from white to red ages ago.

The man screamed again, a worse and uglier sound like Steve had never heard before, his narrow face contorting and smooth words gone in a flash. He grabbed the edges of the shield and yanked on it, hard enough to send Steve spiralling head-first past him. It was distracting, and sooner than he gained his footing Steve found himself tossed over a thigh by his throat and armpit. He hit the back of his neck against the sidewalk and heard the crackle of electricity from the bigger guy’s hammer he waved around.  
“Great…” Steve gasped. He scrambled for his shield and braced himself for the attack. The shield really felt like a lid of a trashcan again.

There was the searing sound and heat of Iron Man’s weapons. Steve heard a suppressed gasp, stumbled up once more after the attack and kicked the black haired man’s legs out from underneath him. Stark blasted the blonde one further away.

“Did you miss me?” he asked, and the mechanic sound was still clearly amused.  
“You could have come earlier,” Steve huffed back, straddling his opponent, who seemed a little dazed by now.  
“Any time, Cap!”

A handful of new SHIELD agents ran towards them, training their guns on the bigger hostile climbing on his feet.  
“It’d be a really good time to make your move now, Dungeons and Dragons,” Stark commanded, “or else I’ll find a way to shoot a hole through you both.”  
“I will not be treated with such disrespect! I have been called a god here!” the blonde roared back, “You, with such puny and useless weaponry -” he paused when someone shot him with a tranquilizing dart, “- how dare you?” he continued seemingly untroubled, taking a few purposeful steps closer. A few darts more shot into his arm.  
“He’s not going down!” someone snapped into the comms.

Steve was surprised by a low, breathy laugh from beneath him. The man had closed his eyes for a moment, but was now looking around, lifting two trembling hands to rest on the ground, next to his head.  
“I wish not to cause further trouble”, he huffed out.  
“Is that a surrender?” Steve asked. The man just nodded and bared his teeth in something that was probably supposed to be a smile.  
Another few shots, more shouting (slurred this time), and a sound of a huge man falling down on the ground. His slimmer friend laughed again, heaving a few deep breaths through his nose, but Steve found the shaking of his now tightly shut fists more worrying.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now we have two captive nutcases and two weird weapons in our hands. Better search for a consult!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've now written the third chapter as well, so I think that this surprise story is actually taking off pretty well...?  
> Let me know if you spot any mistakes and also I'd love to hear some other feedback!

“Sir. Rogers is clear from the medical bay. A few ugly bruises and a sprained wrist, but nothing his body can’t recover from.”  
“Good. What can you tell me about Mister God?”  
“Sir. He’s just woken up and right now he seems more stable and approachable of the two, if also physically more dangerous - he wasn’t going to surrender so we tranquilized him to bring him in. Took a lot more than the standard dose, and... his blood sample doesn’t actually match with human DNA.”  
“Is he… a mutant?”  
“We don’t know sir, but he is almost twice as heavy and four times as strong as he looks, and he looks stronger than most. So watch out when you speak to him. We issued him with the Hulk-level cuffs, they should hold him down for now.”  
“Thank you, Hill.”

 

/ / / /

 

"Hi, lovely to meet you in person, I was only monitoring things during the fight,” Phil said as he stepped inside and the door slid shut behind him. Straw-blonde hair hung around the restrained man’s shoulders and framed his largely unbruised face. There was a scratch on his cheek and he was breathing deeply, but even if he did still look a bit fuzzy, his piercing glare was enough confirmation as to if he was back in the game or not.  
“I'm Agent Coulson. Sorry for the tranquilizers, we didn't have a chance at getting you to this interrogation room otherwise. It won't happen again, as long as you behave. If you don’t however, we’ll get you something stronger than last time."

He was met with a silent, displeased stare that raised the hairs on the back of his neck like static, but got no other answer. The man had a wide jaw and bulging arms, a massive frame even without the outer layers of armor. He didn’t look old and weary in the usual way most superhuman terrorists did - Phil might have even described the man as vigorous.  
Still, while there was a healthy roundness to his face that could have been friendly in any other situation, Phil didn’t doubt for a moment that the previously seen ruthless fighter behind it would have already beat him to a pulp without the restraints.

"Why have you two come here? I guess whatever it is, it must be important for you. In one night you've killed five of our men, you and your friend.”  
The blonde man looked at him for a moment, then nearly smiled even if it was more of a little crease in the corners of his eyes. Phil didn’t like it, but it was a bit better than a crazed laugh or a long villain monologue. This guy had been interrogated before. A professional.

"It wasn't clean either, I can see that you two are not trained to be assassins, careful and subtle. You two are messy and loud, but effective. You cleared up the space pretty well, it wasn't easy to sneak up on you,” he said, studying the man’s face for any little clues as to what he was thinking. He was angry, that much was obvious, but maybe also a little amused in some really strange way. And very silent.  
"No, you're soldiers, aren't you. I should have figured it out earlier, battle-driven. So tell me who you’re warring against. Us? We don’t know you. Who is your commander? Are we expecting a bigger-scale ambush any time soon next week?”  
And suddenly the man opened his mouth. A deep voice, and he sounded almost bored when he said: “There’s a lot you fail to know.”

Phil wasn’t exactly pleased.

"If we know nothing then maybe you could start by telling us something. So I ask again: why have you come here? It was quite an entrance you made, you and your friend,” he said, just as calmly as before, never breaking eye contact with the man. “You made our best men look like a couple of average boxers. It’s hurtful."  
“It is the way of things,” the man replied so matter-of-factly that Phil almost believed him for a second. Where on Earth did these kind of guys spawn from?  
“Usually it isn’t,” he said back, clasping his hands in front of his body to relax his posture slightly, “But of course we could put you and your friend under a slightly different set of tests to get you to tell us something. But I would like to handle things the nice way.”  
It worked. The man sat up a lot straighter, and even though he was cuffed to bench Phil was unsure about whether he was going to stay sitting for long.

"What have you done with him?” he asked, eyeing Phil from beneath his brows. The question came completely out of the blue, what with the man’s earlier silence, but it was always good to get some sore points dragged out into the open with zero effort.  
“Who?” Phil asked casually. The man squeezed his hands into fists and the muscles in his arms tensed and flexed as he visibly reined himself in.  
“My comrade. Where is he? I demand the right to hold council with my brother-in-arms. I will not be treated like this, like I were a common criminal."  
"Oh, he,” Phil said and nodded, “He is in another interrogation cell. And until either one of you talks, it's not going to happen."  
"Don’t mock me, mortal,” the man growled, and wasn’t that interesting. Phil glanced towards the camera installed in the room. This would all need to be transcripted and studied properly.  
“I’m not mocking you, I just wish to know why you attacked us,” he huffed, but apparently it did little to calm the man down. He was liking the guy less and less every minute, but there was something really fishy about the situation.  
“I will be rid of these chains, and you will be sorry that you ever raised your hand against the Mighty Thor!"

“That’s your name, isn’t it?” Phil asked, filing away the really strange speech patterns for later. The man seemed to be on the verge of losing the last of his patience, nostrils flaring and cheeks reddening.  
“Of course it is…! You… you are a worthless realm, with no grasp of what is common courtesy or etiquette. This is outrageous, you treat us with none of the respect you should. And you have stolen what Asgard has gifted you for safekeeping, and used it as your own.”  
“I don’t know what this Asgard is, and I don’t think we’ve stolen anything from you.”  
“Liar,” the blonde man spat. “You all know that the stone is not yours to fool around with.” And the man fell silent again. He let out a long, very disappointed and frustrated sigh through his nose, and Phil looked at him for a long while. It was a clear dismissal.

"Well… Thank you for the chat. Thor. That's a nice name you've got there."

 

/ / / /

 

“Agent Hill, talk to me.”  
“Romanoff. He says his name is Thor. He actually claims to be _the_ Thor, the viking god, we looked into it just a moment ago and Coulson is trying to get in touch with someone who knows the mythology. The darker one hasn’t said a thing yet, but he has finally stopped sulking and breathing like he’d just run a marathon. His vital signs are looking closer to normal - though still abnormally high for resting pulse and blood pressure, abnormally low for body temperature, and the blood sample shows increased adrenaline levels. So we have a huge blonde god-complex and his stressed-out friend.”  
“Mm.. Simmons said that the friend is not a human either. And I saw him fighting at least as hard as ‘Thor’. He dropped his weapon and surrendered before we could tranquilize him too, so he seems to be the more clever one of the two.”  
“Also issued with Hulk-level cuffs, but he doesn't seem half as bothered by them than the other guy, so probably a little less wise than he is. That could be a dangerous mix. Go on but watch out.”

 

/ / / /

 

"How are you? Still not talking, are we now,” she started conversationally, shutting the door behind her and sitting down across him. Black hair cut to reach the top of his neck, young face that still looked like a skull, and pale eyes with deep shadows underneath them. His only answer was to smile a little in the crooked way that as far seemed to be his only happy emotion, stretching his neck a little and breathing deeply. Deliberately.  
"So, your big buddy told us that his name is ...Thor? I think I heard you shout it too, when you were fighting. You’ve got good lungs,” she shrugged, “It's sure an interesting one, not very usual around here. Could you tell me yours? I am agent Natasha Romanoff."  
A suppressed roll of his eyes was all the answer she received, and for some reason she felt like he was having difficulties to focus. Rubbing and pinching his palms, staring more through her than at her, and still taking deep, forced breaths. And he was good at hiding it all - someone else might not have noticed. So he was the strategist. Nice chit-chat wouldn’t work on its own.

"You two made quite a mess on your way to wherever you’re going. Do you have a set goal somewhere, or are you just sight-seeing? I really doubt the latter, you seem like a clever enough guy to dress lighter for a walking trip,” she smiled. He had been stripped of most of his gear (more instructed to do so himself, because the amount of straps and layers was incomprehensible) and even the base layers were thick and tightly wrapped around his body. All green and brown fabric and black leather, supporting his middle and sides and wrists and protecting his neck and arms. Barely any skin visible. 

His eyes flicked to her face, dropping lower for a heartbeat, before he looked down his nose at the concrete floor again. Natasha was no idiot - she knew that he was evaluating her as well.  
“Your fighting style is impressive, and you two play well together. Have you done these kind of mercenary jobs for long?" she asked. He raised a dark brow at mercenary, and the lazily put on expression he wore spoke of disappointment and insult. A deliberate scrap given to her from his plate.  
"Not a mercenary then. But you two do work together often, don’t you,” she agreed. 

He hadn’t spoken up apart from a few grunts and screams during the fight and what Steve told of a few short sentences. At least he seemed to understand English well enough to follow conversations even if his eyes wandered.  
“We noticed some unusual spikes of energy from the spear, and we’re just now getting in touch with some guys from the linguistics to look at the symbols that are carved on it,” Natasha said, showing him a picture of the weapon which she had picked up on her way to the interrogation in the hopes that he would say something about it. He didn’t.  
“We didn't get any energy readings on it when you laid it off your hands, but before that it seemed very strong. What’s powering it?” she plowed on. Still no answer.  
“The hammer your friend used is also impressive. We couldn’t get it to budge from its place, so it’s still there on the street. Luckily we were able to play it off as a university project,” she said, fishing for a reaction. He purposefully didn’t look up at the mention of the hammer’s location, but his hands paused. Were they headed for the science buildings?

“Can you tell me who gave you the weapons?"  
"Weapon smiths,” he said with a crisp accent, looking up, and she was almost surprised by how calmly and mildly he spoke. Despite the small forward-leaning movement and its obvious threat, his unstable demeanor, sunken eyes and sharp smile had had Natasha expecting something a lot nastier.  
"Where?" she asked with a smile.  
"Somewhere your kind would never survive,” he replied, looking more than a little snug in his stoicism, and leaned back again, apparently finished with the conversation. She wasn’t.

"This about survival, then,” she half asked, but he wasn’t looking at her anymore, “Are you hunting after something or is your hurry actually… fleeing from something?”  
He glanced in her general direction before focusing again and fixing her with a surprisingly intense stare.  
“No,” he snapped simply, not elaborating his answer. Was it only the nerves of the interrogation or was he having weird mood swings due to some other reason? Natasha frowned a little, picking up the picture of his weapon and studying it casually. He sat in silence.  
“You act cool, mister, but you seem a bit antsy and your vital signs scream of stress. So either there’s an actual problem or you’re unused to fighting like this, which is obviously not the case,” she observed out loud. He looked at her, narrowing his eyes slightly, but made no other emotion visible.  
“I’m guessing that the spear, it must be difficult to handle or dangerous to use somehow, right? Your buddy’s biggest problem seems to be the faint smell of ozone that clings to him, but he is in no way as bad shape as you’re in. Are you using it willingly or is it part of some uncomfortable training program?"  
For a long while he was silent and looked somewhere through and past her again, working his jaw slightly. Weighing his words. She should have probably provoked him further to get out anything of value, but that could wait until the future. When he looked back up in her eyes the right corner of his lips quirked again into the wry half-smile.  
"No,” he said again, and didn’t answer a thing.  
"You're not very helpful, are you,” she said, and his smile twisted a bit further.  
"I try not to. Not for mortals like you."

That was weird. Maybe the guy was just a little funny in the head.

"Thor requested to ‘hold council’ with you,” Natasha said, “Would you like that to be arranged before we continue with the interrogation?” He only snorted lightly.  
"I doubt that you lot would fail to listen in if you granted his wish.”  
“No, we wouldn’t,” she admitted. “I’m just trying to get you to talk, but I think you already figured that out. I don’t really think that you’re an idiot even if you play mute,” she shrugged, collecting her things and standing up. She’d be back soon, but it was better to go and discuss things with the team first.  
“You may call me Loki,” he spoke up when she was at the door. And Loki smiled a little when he added: “He will blurt it out sooner or later, I have no doubts about that.”

 

/ / / /

 

Three screens cast a pale blue light in the break-room-turned-monitor-center, a yellow lamp next to them. Bruce sat in a swivel chair in front of the desk, and turned around when he heard the door open. A digital clock next to the screens blinked. 01:18 AM.  
“Hi Tony. You up next?”  
“Yup, I came early to keep you company. Grabbed you a sandwich and a coffee too.”  
“Thanks.”  
Tony rolled up another chair and slouched down on it, still too tired to sit properly. It had been a once in a lifetime situation of deep sleep, and he’d just had to agree to a midnight shift with this mess. Important SHIELD business required more than low-level agents, as if. After a few sips of coffee movement on the middle screen caught his attention.

“That’s the cell, right. What’s he doing?”  
“The dark one? ‘Loki’?”  
“Bruce, I know what sleeping looks like, of course the dark one. Rolling his shoulders and…?” Tony gestured with his hands in search for a word that wouldn’t sound as stupid as breathing.  
“I should be the one sleeping like that,” he added, pointing his sandwich at the screen on the right-hand side, where the brawnier maniac was sprawled out on his cot as wide as he could. Bruce let out an amused hum.

“His pulse has been slowly getting down towards a more human level, so my best guess would be some… alien self-help meditation,” he said, nodding towards the screen that showed a dark-clad figure swaying on his feet in an even rhythm. Bruce leaned forward to turn up the volume of the audio feed a little. What followed was the sound of deep breathing and whispered words in a language neither could name.  
“What the heck…?”  
“Yeah, I don’t know, but it’s a repetitive sequence, and every once in a while he just stops to take a couple of really deep breaths and holds them in for longer than I could.”

“Bruce…” Tony started through a mouthful of bread and ham before swallowing it down with coffee, “Are you actually telling me that you’re _following_ his alien self-help meditation?”  
“Well, I’ve been keeping watch for at least an hour now, and he was already at it when I sat down,” Bruce replied with a shrug and raised hands, “I didn’t have anything else to do. And if I did they’d probably call me irresponsible.”  
“That’s… okay. Have you noticed anything… else?”  
“He’d probably actually be moving his arms a lot more as well if he didn’t have the handcuffs.”  
“Bruce, go on a taiji class. You half-learning alien rituals is really scaring me.”

“About ten minutes in he just stopped everything and turned to face the far wall, all the monitors went crazy and he just… I don’t know, stood there hissing to himself and clawing at his face. You see that dent in the wall? He punched it there. He knows where the camera is, I think. Didn’t turn around before it passed and he started over.”  
“O...kay? I guess that’s something,” Tony mumbled back. It was a very strange and freaky description of events. And yeah, he _did_ see a dent in the cell wall.  
“And at one point the blonde one started to snore so I muted his audio,” Bruce said, nodding towards the sleeping man’s screen.  
“That’s probably for the better. Are they gonna - hey, what’s he doing now?”  
The whispering stopped when the darker nutcase suddenly looked around himself. Tony thought he heard a bored ‘hmm’ when the man sat down on his cot and leaned his back against the wall. And stopped doing everything he’d done for so long.  
“Bruce, what’s he doing?” Tony asked again.  
“I don’t know, sleeping? It’s the middle of the night and we have a possibly alien or possibly crazy man in a cell. Why do you think I know what he thinks?” Bruce mumbled, taking of his glasses and massaging his face.  
“You know his yoga routine.”  
“I’m never going to hear the end of that, am I?”  
“Nope. Wait till I tell this to the super spies.”

 

/ / / /

 

The sky was a rosy white of early summer mornings. The seas were still. First thing Thor saw was the face of the slaughtered beast as it rose above the hill. He couldn’t find Mjölnir, and the fires were raging around him, around the small lake, burning down trees and small houses.

_“Thor, why must you always make things so difficult?”_

He looked down the hill, and saw below a sharp cliff and an ugly road that surely didn’t fit any of the open landscape around him. And Thor knew that the situation wasn’t real, when he saw his brother climbing up the cliff, blue of face as the summer sky and dressed in a coat made of a bearskin. 

_“‘Tis not my fault that you interrupted a dream while I am dreaming it. Though I am glad that you did. It is a strange one. And I am also glad to see that you’ve managed alright.”_

The blue melted away when Loki stood up, brushing dust off of his fur coat. He looked around, scrunching his face in doubt like he was seeing only half of the chaos, and for all Thor knew maybe he was. Eventually Loki tilted his head in half a shrug. He looked tired, but not as ragged and exhausted as Thor remembered from a few previous battles. Then again, this hadn’t really been battle, more of a show. The snout of the bear lay on Loki’s forehead. 

_“Why am I dressed like this?”_  
_“I could ask you the same question, and we’d be none the wiser. What is the matter?”_

Loki pointed a finger towards the north, where a mass of buildings rose over the forested islands. Thor was rather certain that he hadn’t seen them there moments prior, but Loki seemed to have taken control over the landscape.

 _“They do not possess Mjölnir. It’s still on the side of the road where you left it after they made you fall asleep. I think that they have already moved the Tesseract to another location. Or are now moving it.”_

They were no longer standing on the cliff. They were standing on the street where they had fought, looking at Mjölnir. It was surrounded by people and strange obstacles. Thor couldn’t focus his gaze on them at all, but it might have been because Loki wasn’t showing him anything concrete. Just a thought.

 _“What do you suggest we should do?”_  
_“I could transport us there, but I’d rather do it from outside to get a better picture of where we are. You could also just… summon the hammer and break us free.”_  
_“But you do not think that wise, do you?”_  
_“No. I suggest we find out what these little fools are planning to do with the gem and find it with their help.”_

The sun was rising in the east. Maybe. Thor wasn’t sure. He also wasn’t sure when they had returned to the cliff that was now a whole hill again. Loki let out a long, deep breath before he started to fade away from where he stood on his right-hand side.

 _“I will leave you to your dream again, my concentration is slipping.”_  
_“You should try to get some sleep as well. Oh - and they call the island Skeppsholmen, nowadays. Schhhhhepshulmen… Something like that.”_  
_“Skippholmr? Truly? That’s horrible.”_

 

/ / / /

 

Seville was a sunny city, the early morning was very warm, and the university buildings were all a great sight. It was an easy place to hide in plain sight if you dressed smartly enough. The halls and staircases were bustling with people.

“Agents Coulson and Barton of SHIELD. Are you Professor Elliot Randolph?” Phil said when the door was opened. Clint stood slightly behind him, keeping his eyes on the corridor of the university faculty. “We contacted you yesterday.”  
“The very man, you’re both welcome in. I was waiting for you already.”  
Exchanging pleasantries was never one of Clint’s favorites, so he was happy to stand by the door and watch the situation with a little nod here and there. Professor Elliot Randolph was not a very big but a very insignificant-looking middle-aged man. White with short, slightly wavy hair and smart, brown oxford shoes. He was polite and patient - in a very British way, the sort where you could never really be sure if he meant his words as a compliment or not - but had a long-suffering and almost snobby air about him as well.  
The accent was difficult to place, but according to his words he had lived moving from a culture to another. Coulson said nothing about it when the man sat down at his desk, and neither did Clint.

“So. Apparently you were looking for a specialist in things Old Norse?” Professor Randolph asked, and his tone was light but he didn’t smile.  
“Yes, I’m glad that we could get in touch with you on such a short notice,” Phil said to him in an equally mild tone. “We have an artefact we’d like you to take a look at. Pictures of it, at least.”  
“What might it be…” Randolph muttered to himself, sounding almost bored as he took the pile of pictures Clint gave him. The man fell silent as he looked through them, repeating the process and eventually spreading the pictures on his desk  
“Can you tell us anything about the spear?” Coulson asked, and Randolph gave him an odd look before.  
“Well, I can hardly date an artefact just by looking at a picture, but I’d say that this is… old? I’m more of a mythology professor than an archeologist,” he said slowly and nodded carefully, frowning at the glossy pictures. He looked at them for a good while, humming to himself. Clint wasn’t one to start pointing fingers at anyone, but for some reason he felt like the man was playing time.

“Can I ask you how you came upon this thing? It might narrow things down a little,” Randolph asked, but Phil stopped him with a smile straight away.  
“I’m sorry, it’s classified.”  
“Alright, I’m not going to nose around. Though I think that the scripture is elder _fuþark_ \- it’s an alphabet system, definitely norse. And it states that, whatever this is, it should ‘inspire rage’,” he said, leaning back in his chair and lifting his hands in a half serious shrug.  
“Inspire rage?” Coulson asked with a slight frown.  
“...Yes. I can write the runes down for you,” he said, taking his time with squinting at the picture and drawing the words on a piece of notebook paper.  
“Based on the carvings I’d say I’m looking at a Berserker staff. It looks old and authentic. But of course it also looks fake. Because it’s… fairly clean,” Randolph said and lifted his brows a little. Clint took the paper at Phil’s nod when the professor stood up and headed towards a bookcase on the far wall, across from the windows of his cramped study. 

“Why anyone would do something like this is a trickier question - or maybe it’s a role play weapon. You know how kids these days love their fantasy stories. Why you would be interested in it is what makes it so strange,” he talked mostly to himself while leafing through a book or two he pulled from the shelves.  
“...There are many stories of ornate staffs used by warriors. A few of them viking sagas. Still,” he said and opened a book for them on the table, showing a black and white wood carving of a clumsily drawn man holding a long staff above his head, “they’re just medieval legends and not much proof of anything.” Another picture followed, a colourful print from an illuminated renaissance book.  
“It says here that the warrior is a berserker. Does it mean something specific?” Clint asked with a frown, pointing out the line in the study. Professor Randolph fixed him with an amused look, but didn’t explain what he found so funny.  
“Etymologically it means bear-shirt. Or bear-skin,” Professor Randolph said. “Another term is _úlfhedinn_ , or wolf-head.”  
“Has it to do something with the spear?” Coulson asked, “We could really do with everything you can tell us.”

Professor Randolph looked at the both of them for a long while, but in the end he let out a long sigh and shook his head.  
“If you insist,” he muttered and sat down in his chair again.  
“Please,” Coulson nodded curtly and motioned for him to continue.  
“The staff should, probably,” Randolph said slowly, lifting his brows and looking at them, and pulled up one of their pictures, “as it says, ‘inspire rage’. If it is what gives power to the berserk warrior, it would, according to sagas and legends, lead to a very violent, trance-like condition that makes the warrior virtually unbeatable. That's why bears and wolves,” he said. Phil frowned slightly.  
“What do you mean by unbeatable?” he asked. Randolph crossed his arms over his chest.  
“I can’t claim to know anything about a magic weapon of 12th century,” he huffed, but Phil’s firm look made him sigh. “Most likely an adrenaline rush or something along those lines. Focused on aggression, very hard to contain or kill and unable to feel pain.”

“Do you know why anyone would want to make one of those?”  
“Is this still hypothetical?” Randolph asked, even though all three of them knew that it wasn’t. Sometimes Clint really wondered where Coulson managed to find all these people who knew about things that weren’t even supposed to exist. It was really weird.  
“Humor me,” Phil smiled.  
“To fight, obviously. To kill and to be unbeatable. It was believed that specific runes or staves would protect or charm weapons and their masters. Think about the destruction seven men alone equipped with these could create.”  
“What would a man need to reach the… berserker effects? If we rule out magic as an option,” Coulson asked.  
“Mushrooms,” Randolph scoffed and cut him off, standing up and crossing the room to get his coat from the rack behind the door of his study. Clint was lifting a hand to stop him, but Coulson shook his head, so he sighed and let it drop.

“You’re leaving?” Clint asked.  
“You have a problem, and I can’t see anything from your photos,” Elliot Randolph said and stuffed two books and the pictures of the spear into a bag. He shrugged his coat on and opened the door for them.  
“You might as well take me to your classified headquarters and show me the classified staff if you really want my help,” he suggested as mildly as before. Clint looked at Coulson questioningly.  
“Sir, he’s a civilian.”  
“I know,” Phil answered and turned towards Professor Randolph again. “We might as well take you home so you can pack up a few things. There’s another thing we need you to check on first. It’s in Sweden. And then we’ll leave for the US,” he said. Randolph turned his head a little, seemingly curious about what it was that he needed to see.  
“It’s a hammer,” Coulson added, and Clint could have sworn that the professor paled slightly. Maybe it was just the flickering of the lights in the room.

“Why not. I’ve surely done stranger things in my life,” Randolph said and led them out.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well, team. Things might get a little trippy now. Also, science.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you lovely people for commenting, I hope that you are as excited with this as I am! Next chapter is already on its way, I'm trying to write this so I always have one extra ready when I post the first.

Jane had wallowed in anxiety for a whole evening and night after she had seen the news about Stockholm's strange Friday. The newsreaders called it a small-scale riot, but right next to the Department of Astronomy… And some dark amateur footage showing that Captain America had been the one to run in to save the day? It seemed really strange and scary.  
Naturally she sort of forgot about it in the morning when she and Darcy started looking at the flipping weird readings of yesterday. It wasn’t like she couldn’t think about multiple things simultaneously, rather she actively chose to focus her attention on those few multiple things that were related to the research instead of anything else.

So when her phone buzzed on the desk, she didn’t answer immediately.  
“Jane, it’s Erik!” Darcy said, sounding alarmed, and after that all the worry came rushing back. It had been a month since he’d left for Stockholm to get some of his old colleagues’ opinions on their hypotheses and calculations. Darcy tossed Jane the phone and she hurried to answer it before it ended.  
“Erik! Are you alright? Please tell me you’re alright, I’m so sorry that I wasn’t there, I didn’t even call or text you!” Jane blurted out in one breath. Hearing his voice on the other end of the line was a huge relief.  
“Jane. Jane, calm down. I’m fine,” he reassured her, but it was only making her feel worse. She had _forgotten_ all about him during the day.  
“I’m so sorry, if something would have happened to you I don’t know what… I don’t know what…”  
“Jane, I am alright,” Erik said firmly. Jane heard his little huff of laughter after that, and it was comforting. “I’m fine. Nothing but a scare that kept me from sleeping last night.”  
“Okay,” she said, and gave Darcy a thumbs-up when she peered around the desk to look at her. The intern let out an enormous sigh of relief as well.  
“Hi Erik!” she said loudly, and Jane told: “Darcy says hi.”

“But you were there? With your colleagues?” she asked Erik when she felt like she could think clearly again. He made a questioning little sound before an agreeing ‘ah’.  
“At Vanadislunden? Yes. We managed to run away as soon as the noise started,” he said. There was a short pause, but before Jane had a chance to fill it he spoke up again: “But that’s not why I called you, Jane.”  
“...then why did you call?” she asked slowly, looking at Darcy with a frown.  
“What’s going on?” she asked Jane. She could only shrug and quietly mouth _'I don’t know'_. Erik was always a bit… melodramatic, in the same way movie trailer voices were. This was still odd.  
“It’s, uh… the agents who came to clean things up, Jane,” Erik answered, lowering his voice slightly, “Big black cars and a lot of guns at least from what I saw. They came to visit the university today. Talked to all of us, and now they have taken over some of our research -”

Their research?

“They what!?” Jane snapped, jumping up from her chair. A quick rush of anger washed over her, but it left quickly, and her head was left feeling very hollow. Buzzing with the absence of all thought.  
“What do you mean ‘taken over’, Erik?” she asked. Their work, was it actually _gone_? The last five years of her life had been spent with the study, and they’d just had a new, fresh start with their research. Darcy was actually willing to intern for them. Why hadn’t she left for Sweden with Erik? ( _Why had she let Erik go with so much of their research material and copies?_ )  
“What’s happening…?” Darcy tried to ask, but Jane couldn’t answer her, squeezing the phone in her hand a bit too tight.  
“- they want to ask if you -” Erik tried, but she cut him off again.  
“They can’t just storm in and take my research! Didn’t you do anything?”  
“- Jane! They want to enlist you on the new project! I already agreed to it on my part,” he said, raising his voice again to keep her from freaking out. It was not helping, at all, and Jane nearly hissed with disbelief and anger like a teakettle.  
“No! No! Why would you -”  
“You’d get to work with Doctor Banner!”

“...oh,” she said and fell silent for a moment. “I mean - what?” The last time they had tossed around the names of potential researchers who might be interested in their uncertain theories, Erik had said that he had known Banner. But that some years ago the man had disappeared entirely as if the earth itself had swallowed him up.  
“Yes. They even gave me a number, I already called him and he said that he has heard about your project already,” Erik replied, waiting a moment for if she had anything to say. She didn’t.  
“They are moving something to a location in the States, and that’s where the project would continue,” he explained and she nodded, realizing only a while later that he probably couldn’t hear it.  
“Yeah, okay.”

“So, when I get there, I’ll give you a call again. And then we can meet and talk about this. And I can take you to talk with the important people in charge of this mess. Is that okay?” Erik sounded like he was trying to calm down a skittish animal, but maybe Jane had been acting like one. She didn’t really know anymore. Darcy was sorting through the notes on the desk but stared at her intently. No doubt wanting to know what had had her so mad and now so dazed.  
“Sure, yeah,” Jane heard herself say. “Are you going to be here soon?”  
“I’m already at the airport. It’s three PM here. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Erik said. “Take care.”  
“You too.”

“Okay,” Darcy started with expectantly raised brows and looked at Jane over her glasses, “what was that about?” Jane set the phone back on the desk and leaned back in her chair.  
“It’s a little difficult to… summarize,” she sighed, looking up at Darcy.  
“Erik’s okay?” the darker woman asked.  
“Yeah,” Jane answered.  
“We okay?”  
“I guess so,” she said. “Now that I think about it, we might actually start getting some funds for this work too.”

  
/ / / /  


Regular afternoon traffic buzzed slowly around Stockholm, but luckily the Nordic capitals were not nearly as crowded as many other European cities. Managing to put up a roadblock on the north side of Vanadislunden hadn’t been that difficult. 

Phil jogged down the stairs with a file under his arm, heading to where Professor Randolph was slowly edging closer towards the enclosed area. He kept close to the plastic wrap walls of the structure, circling slowly closer towards the hammer that quietly sat on the pavement.  
“Whatever you can tell us about the artefact is a good piece of information. I have the results of some radiation and electricity scans here, it seems to create a small magnetic field around itself, though we’re not actually sure how,” Phil told Randolph, offering him the file. He was a bit taken aback when the man waved him away and shushed him, eyes locked on the strange weapon. Perhaps he just needed some silence and space. Phil could do that.

“This _is_ Mjölnir,” Professor Randolph breathed out in such a slow whisper that Phil could hardly hear it.  
“A what? What are you doing?” he asked while the man had already taken a few tentative steps closer. “What are you doing?” he asked again when he got no answer.  
“It’s not every day one can…” professor Randolph muttered to himself, stopping next to the hammer.  
“It won’t budge, we’ve tried everything to -” Phil started to say, but shut his mouth when the professor just crouched next to the weapon and slowly, carefully reached out a hand to touch the corners and the decorative carvings. He craned his head to look at it more closely, and actually the man looked to be in some sort of a strange, horrified bliss because of the artefact. Like he’d seen the ghost of a long-lost relative. He muttered something to himself that Phil couldn’t hear.  
“Is something wrong, Professor Randolph?” he asked.  
“I like to think myself a pacifist,” Randolph said a little louder this time, studying the smooth ridges and inlaid silver of the handle, “I’ve never liked fighting, but... I would happily go to war if I were armed with something as finely crafted as this magnificent thing.”

  
/ / / /  


_All agents in the temporary Stockholm headquarters, prepare for moving the prisoners to the quinjets to get to the helicarrier. Calling all agents in the temporary headquarters. We are preparing for proceeding to the helicarrier._

_All guard personnel, alert. We’re getting two new guests any time now, so make sure to check the lockdown systems of the cell level doors. Prepare for further instructions before takeoff._

  
/ / / /  


"So, what have we got?" Phil asked when he looked at the display screen with clips and pictures of the happenings of last night. The sounds of the helicarrier were luckily not very audible indoors, even if they were already airborne.

"Too many civilians on this case,” Clint said from around the table, grumbling and frowning to himself. He rolled a laser pointer pen in his hands, and quickly flicked the red light straight in the middle of Stockholm’s map on the screen. “We have two locations in the city, a shitload of witnesses, a weird literature professor and three civilian scientist who weren’t supposed to be taken in at all. That’s really too many.”  
"We also have two crazy superhuman criminals who claim to be gods,” Natasha shrugged.  
“Yeah, that,” Clint snorted a laugh.  
“Wait, wait! I thought we already agreed that they’re aliens. Natasha, you know I don’t really believe in any gods,” Tony interrupted and waved his arms. Phil looked at the both of them with a sigh, and Natasha shot him a sympathetic gaze.

“Okay, let’s stop here. Agent Romanoff, what did you get from the… ‘Loki’ one? A brief rewind, please,” he asked her. She took a small breath and shook her head.  
“I’m not really sure. He’s good at putting up façades, that much is for sure, but I think that he’s bound to crack them because he’s also really full of himself. Just like Stark,” which was followed with a displeased ‘excuse you’, “I’d say he’s the one doing all the thinking for the both of them,” she said and brushed a hand through her red hair, assembling her thoughts.  
“He said that they got the weapons from someone else and somewhere he didn’t specify. I think it must be the staff, but either he has a condition of some sort or then it’s something else affecting him. A drug or… the energy from the spear. He has been shaking, sweating and showing some quick mood swings - and he looks like a skeleton compared to the other guy,” Natasha added. 

Phil trusted in her analyses more than most of SHIELD’s psychologists when it came to gouging out bad guy thoughts, but he frowned a little when he pulled up a hand-held pad. The little screen was soon filled with video feed from the holding cells.  
“Are you sure? I can agree on him being skinnier, but other than that I’d say he looks... pretty okay right now,” he said and dragged the window on the meeting table’s graphic surface to better show the feed. Visibly there was nothing really off with the captive. He just looked like a bored young man, sitting on the cot at the end of his cell in his long black sleeves and stiff, high collar.  
“The guy sure packs a punch, you should have seen him out there in Stockholm. He was nuts, fought back like a small army. I haven’t heard anyone make whackier sounds either,” Steve pointed out, frowning at the video.  
“Whatever he did last night must have helped then. Tell ‘em, Bruce,” Tony spoke up and nudged the man sitting next to him with a foot to the shin. Everyone turned to look at the two scientists. Bruce sighed.

“When I was keeping watch, and when Tony came in, he was doing something that, uh… Those Asian self-defense sports, they usually have a lot of breathing exercises, you know?” he asked and looked around, “Or yoga, there’s a lot of focus on breathing there too. And if you look at it more spiritually it should also help you control and… calm your body’s energies.”  
“Are you saying that the possibly alien hostile who almost beat up Captain America is into nightly yoga sessions?” Phil asked, and while he might have been smiling in a slightly amused way, he was also serious about it.  
“No, but he stayed up most of the night doing a repetitive breathing exercise,” Bruce shrugged. Natasha looked at him with an amused quirk of her lips, but said nothing.  
“Yeah, and he also punched a hole through the wall,” Tony cut in. The meeting room fell silent for a while when everyone dragged their eyes back towards the feed. There was a visible crack in the wall of the cell, but the pale man sitting beside it, calm and collected, really didn’t fit the picture.  
“Okay. I guess we need to be careful with him, then,” Coulson said and swiped the feed back onto his tablet.  
"...I’m getting a headache,” Bruce mumbled.

“Now that we’ve got the Real Slim Shady covered, what about the bigger guy?” Tony asked, “Weren’t you the one talking to him, Agent Supernanny? What have you got?” he prodded further. Natasha held back a laugh at that but Phil just gave a thin smile.  
“If, as Natasha said, ‘Loki’ is the brains of the duo, then we really have a problem on our hands. Because that makes ‘Thor’ the brawn. And I hate to say this, but we needed enough sedatives in him to render a bull moose unconscious just to bring him in. He killed four men in maybe a little less than an hour - one a police officer, three our own agents. Loki only managed - or chose to - cause one casualty and focused on battling Rogers after that.”  
“Did he talk about the weapons? I think that should be a priority, we need to know how those things work,” Natasha asked and leaned her elbows on the table. She nicked her head slightly to the side and worked up an unhappy smile, “I don’t think that ‘weaponsmiths’ is much of a clue, but the hammer and the spear, they’re… Well, not very common choices with up-and-coming bad guys. At least from what I’ve seen.”  
“He didn’t. We have another lead for those,” Phil said, “But Thor is temperamental enough to give away a few things with very little prodding. The first hint of tougher interrogation techniques sparked up a nice piece of study material, and I ran the interrogation tape through the psych team. At least they were able to piece together something,” he explained as he pulled up an audio file and played it for the team.

 _What have you done with him?_  
_Who?_  
_My comrade._

Phil paused the sound and replayed the file twice.  
“He is obviously getting a bit worked up here. There’s a very short pause before ‘comrade’ and the team analyzing this said that there were also some funny microexpressions indicating that he’d probably said something other than what he thought,” he said, “Which leads us to this.” 

_Where is he? I demand the right to hold council with my brother-in-arms._

Another few replays.  
“He really emphasizes the question, holding back a little, and there’s another half-pause after ‘brother’. So our best guess right now is that the two of them are actually family,” he said.  
“A little protective, don’t you think? Maybe the older sibling,” Steve suggested. When Phil looked at him curiously he just shrugged and said: “I heard this… Loki guy call him ‘brother’ during the battle. So I’d agree. They’re family.”  
“That’s what we thought as well. Good to get another supporting fact,” Phil said. He walked over to the table and sat down, setting the pad on the table and crossing his arms.  
“Then there’s the difficult question Thor sort of kept dodging,” he let out a long breath when he pressed play on the last audio clip, “Why did they come. And where did they come from.”

 _\-- you are a worthless realm, with no grasp of what is common courtesy --_  
_\-- you have stolen what Asgard has gifted you for safekeeping --_

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Clint asked, while Tony asked: “What did they give us?” Phil looked at the both of them with a little frown dampening his usual pleasantness.  
“Stark may be onto something, but we can’t say anything for certain, Not yet, at least,” he said. Some surprised looks were exchanged when Phil turned towards the door to wait.  
“Send the professor in,” he told someone when he turned his comms on for a moment, “We’ve got to deal with this now.”

The door to the side of the room opened and an agent showed the man inside.

“Team, meet Professor Elliot Randolph. Me and agent Barton picked him up from Seville to help with the case, he’s one of the world’s leading experts on Norse Mythology.”  
“Thank you, Agent Coulson,” the man nodded, seemingly pleased with the introduction, looking around the room with a smug little smile. “It’s very exciting to see all of you strong intelligent people in the same room… super heroes. I’ve only seen you on TV,” he added, giving a short laugh.  
“Thanks Professor,” Tony answered and gave him a thumbs-up. Natasha and Steve both glared at him.  
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Professor Randolph,” Steve spoke up after Tony’s shrug and a pointed _‘well, someone’s pissed to be in public’_. He sat up a little straighter in his chair in order to look polite, and asked Randolph: “Can you tell us anything about this mess?”  
“Asgard,” Phil supplied, “What is it, and who are Thor and Loki supposed to be?”  
“Of course,” the man said, visibly diving into his element.

The light dimmed and a new set of pictures opened up on the screen. Old drawings of animals and trees, carved stones and a simple chart of nine blobs with strange words written over them. Randolph walked up to the screen and wiped off a holographic display of the chart with ease. The high-most blob read ‘Asgard’.  
“Asgard was one of the nine mythical lands or realms in the beliefs of the vikings,” the professor said, enlarging the picture. Phil crossed his arms and stepped back. Randolph highlighted the word and dragged up a new one to add under it.  
“The name comes from two words: Áss - pronounced _owss_ , not _ass_ , mind you - which means a god of the line of the Æsir. And,” he dragged up another word, “garður which means a fortress. So, the Fortress of the Gods. The highest of all realms.”

“So when these guys say that they come from the legends, they…?” Natasha asked with a frown. Randolph smiled a little and went back to the screen to bring forth two illustrations and a picture of an old pendant in the shape of a hammer.  
“Thor was supposed to be the patron God of Thunder and Harvest and… Fertility and, well, whatever you like. He’s said to be the strongest of them all. The stories have him fight with a hammer that strikes lightning and causes thunder to roll - just like your guy. He’s pretty cool, I hear. The favourite of the vikings,” he explained and shrugged, “Besides, his father Odin is the King of Asgard, so there’s that.”  
“Whoever these guys are, they’ve done their homework,” Bruce said and scratched the back of his neck. “Right?”  
“Right,” Phil agreed. “Unless we actually have a breed of superhuman aliens lurking around the corner. Or eight,” he added, and the room fell silent for a while. Randolph snorted a little, but it didn’t help the tension when a room full of people thought only ‘I don’t want believe it, but I’m not going to be the one to say it in case I end up having to believe anyway’. 

Steve was in deep thought, frowning at the chart.  
“What about Loki?” he asked, “That’s what the other guy calls himself.” Randolph looked at the screen and enlarged another set of pictures. Some strange animals and a crudely done stone carving of a human face with a pointed chin and long whiskers.  
“Loki is of Thor and Odin’s family through some rather complicated blood oaths. This, this is a funny portrait,” Randolph pointed a finger at the carving, holding back a chuckle, “an old hearth-stone. The vikings were a lot of things, but their art is a bit funny.”  
“If Thor is the God of Thunder, then what’s Loki? The God of looking funny?” Clint asked. Randolph cleared his throat slightly and went back to the topic with a shrug.  
“Well, Snorri’s Edda, a prose collection of the myths, states him as being very pretty. I don’t know, I guess it’s a matter of taste,” he said nonchalantly.  
“He was said to be a master of… a lot of things. Magic, mostly, all kinds of witchcraft and metamorphoses. And he’s linked to a lot of myths regarding the birth of things. Like fire or bad omens. Creatures of the end of the world, that kind of stuff. Good at killing people discreetly, bad at being liked when his screw-ups are found out. Oh, and he was not born an Áss, he was born here,” Randolph said, returning to the chart of the nine worlds. He pointed at a blob that read ‘Jotunheim’.  
“The Home of the Giants, it is. They’re seen as forces of nature, gods and goddesses of winter and hunting and creation and destruction. No one actually knows anything about their families, the stories are a mess. But Loki lives with the Æsir and holds allegiance to Odin just as much as to Thor.” 

“Does he happen to fight with a spear?” Tony asked, lifting his feet on the meeting table. “You know, a dangerous, glowy kind of thing, about five feet long? Just asking for a friend.”  
“No,” Randolph said slowly, and whatever he was going to add next died off. He glanced towards Coulson with an odd look before adding, “Not that I know of it, no. This isn’t about the staff you showed me, is it?”  
“Yes,” Phil said, “And you’re going to have a chance to study it closer after this meeting. The Berserker staff, that’s what you called it?” he asked. Randolph nodded.  
“Yes. Berserkers were warriors who battled like raging beasts, destroying everything in their path. The myth dates back to early 12th century,” the professor said, humming thoughtfully, “Think a berserker having the strength of… Twenty ordinary warriors.”  
“The myth?” Natasha asked, leaning forward in interest. Randolph tensed, his expression closing off a little, but then he breathed out a little laugh.  
“Well, it’s a story written by a French priest. A warrior came from Asgard to Earth with a staff just like the one we established. When their band of warriors was to return home to Asgard, he stayed behind. Because he fell in love. Or so the story goes.”  
“With whom?” Steve asked. Professor Randolph smiled a little, looking like he had already known the question was coming, and gave a shrug.  
“With Earth. The life here,” he said, “or perhaps a girl. A medieval love story. Whatever it was, it made him break the staff in three pieces, hiding them to keep them from falling into wrong hands.”  
“The staff we have is whole, so clearly not the same the legend tells about,” Phil said and Randolph looked very amused.  
“Well, it’s all in poetic verse, so it might be a bit too… metaphorical for your use anyway.”  
“Maybe. Thank you, Professor Randolph. I’ll come and get you when we get things wrapped up here.

"Has anyone thought that what we actually have might be a team unequipped for dealing with this?" Steve asked, looking around to meet everyone’s eyes. “Sure, we’ve handled a few guys trying to blow up buildings or smuggle weapons of mass destruction now, but… not gods and… magic. Or beings from space.”  
“We are now running facials scans of known fugitives from justice, violent psych ward patients and suspected superhuman criminals on our radar. We’re also trying to get a sample of mutant DNA from an underground lab for to compare with,” Phil said calmly, fixing the team with a steady glare. Steve folded his hands together on the table and huffed slightly when Phil finished: “Until we establish for certain that they’re from space, they’re not.”  
"Actually, I was thinking… They are after a gem or a stone, right? That’s what they said,” Tony piped in, flopping the tablet he’d been using on his lap on the table. Professor Randolph’s presentations disappeared when he flicked up a schematic drawing and a lot of readings of a strange-looking cube.  
“What exactly is the Tesseract? Really. I know my dad fished it out of the water, but why do they want it so bad? Why do we want it so bad?"

The lights flickered back on, Phil stepped up to Tony and extended his hand for the pad.  
“It’s classified, for now,” he said with a small smile. “Thank you for finding the weak spot in our security.”  
“You’re welcome, agent.”

  
/ / / /  


It hadn’t taken long for Steve to put two and two together and see that there was a connection. It wasn’t clear and he didn’t know what it entailed, but it was a link anyway.  
What Stark had dug up from SHIELD's secret files was the cube, HYDRA’s cube. They hadn’t told Steve that it had been found, but judging by Coulson’s tight-lipped answer it was another classified thing. 

Schmidt had wanted to become a god through his occult nazi experiments, a higher man, and in turn he had ended up something quite else, a pile of ash. A disappearing pile of ash. The image of bright foreign stars flashed in Steve’s mind even though the rest of the memory was too ugly to dwell on.  
Schmidt had been strong and scary, and now they had two incredibly strong men running after the same burning-hot power source. Claiming that they were gods, from Asgard. Unwilling to speak to _mortal men_. Erskine had said that for Schmidt all the legends were a scientific fact - and the cube certainly had been. The thought alone had the hairs on Steve’s arms raising.

“I’m worried,” he said out loud, interrupting Clint from frowning at his hand. They had stayed up in a small and clinically clean break room to play cards in case something needed quick reaction. Others had left to sleep or to run errands somewhere else inside the helicarrier.  
“Yeah? Why? ‘Cause we have two plain maniacs or alien-god-whatever sitting in chains with no clue as to what we should do with them,” Clint grumbled back and took a big gulp of his coffee, “I’m sure as hell not worried - I’m scared, man.”

“What Tony said, about the Tesseract,” Steve mused, rubbing his face with both hands, even though it didn’t really help to get his thoughts to make sense. He felt so useless. Clint looked up at him with a frown.  
“Schmidt, he… the Red Skull,” Steve corrected himself, because for some reason people seemed to think about a caricature villain rather than the actual man he had met. Clint’s eyebrows rose and he set his cards down on the table.  
“What’s this to do with him?” he asked Steve.  
“I guess I’m just feeling like things repeat themselves right now, but… I think that we should compare them with my blood sample rather than anything else.”  
“Those guys?” Clint shrugged towards the general direction of outside of that room, “For the serum, you mean?”  
“Yeah. I mean, what harm could it do? Maybe they can’t test what my blood was like before the serum, if it changed… me, but if there were any similarities we could at least rule out aliens. Or if there isn’t, we could probably rule out nazis.”  
“You’re still living World War Two, man.”  
“Not that long ago I was, yeah.”

“I’m not supposed to be telling you this, but I’m gonna do it anyway ‘cause I know that you're too stubborn to blurt it out and ‘cause Coulson’s going to tell it some time soon anyway,” Clint muttered when Steve picked up his cards again. He looked up from them to see the archer taking a deep breath.  
“Howard Stark found the Tesseract, the cube, from the Atlantic. I can’t tell you any details because I don’t know, but SHIELD’s been holding it ever since, trying to figure out what the heck we should do with an indestructible thing that keeps generating some impossible energy all on its own.”  
“HYDRA used it for weapons,” Steve scoffed before he even realized what he said - he was practically blaming SHIELD for acting like Schmidt. Clint looked at him a bit funny for a moment, but Steve was able to sigh a little in relief when he saw a wry smirk. The kind that Clint did when he was about to say _‘yeah, shit happens, can’t really do anything about it now’_.  
“Yeah, well, the latest hiding place for it was in Stockholm, at the university. Department of Astronomy, though I have no clue why, which is right next to the park you visited,” Clint shrugged.  
“Right, ‘the Gem’. They knew what they were looking for,” Steve nodded, thinking back to the newsreels he’d seen after the fight.

“Whatever it is, I think it must be important for them. They wouldn’t be doing this otherwise, right? There’s gotta be something spurring them onward,” he said and tried to look to Clint for some kind of validation. The man looked just as confused as he felt.  
“Like what?”  
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m thinking about it out loud,” Steve huffed. He was feeling uncomfortable and the itchy feeling wasn’t leaving him alone. But he was also so... exhausted.  
“I’d like to know what they’re after,” he sighed.  
“Don’t we all, buddy.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some things are difficult to explain. Like magic. Yeah, that's really difficult.
> 
> Also I made some art and an alternative summary [here](https://jasmiinitee.tumblr.com/post/159386594903/do-i-love-my-destruction-duo-i-do-i-do-i-do).

It was already late by both time zones when they neared their destination, but the ongoing situation had the labs of the helicarrier bustling with people. Phil stood by, watching as Professor Randolph’s hands stilled just moments before he would have laid them on the spear. The man fell silent and his reaction was at least as stunned as when he’d seen the hammer. He quickly pulled his hands back, but didn’t look at Phil. Some of his bravado seemed to slip away.

“No. No this is not… this is not what it’s supposed to…” Randolph muttered to himself, eyes widening in shock while he leaned closer against the study table to peer at the carvings on the weapon. Phil frowned.  
“What’s the matter?” he asked calmly. Randolph hummed a little, a nervous but thoughtful tone, before answering.  
“This is not what it’s supposed to look like. This is… Agent Coulson. Whatever you do, let no one touch that thing with their bare hands,” the professor answered firmly but spending more time searching for his words than usual. He was visibly shaken by whatever it was that he saw. It was very strange, and Phil didn’t really know if he wanted to think about what it meant.  
Sadly it was his job to think about those kinds of things.  
“You know what it is supposed to look like?”  
“Yes,” Professor Randolph scoffed instantly, “And this one is far worse than that. I couldn’t see the difference from the pictures, but I wouldn’t hold onto this if I was paid a thousand years’ salary right away.” 

He moved over to Phil’s side of the table and reached out to pull on a pair of thick leather gloves before slowly, carefully turning the spear so the written runes faced them.  
“I’m afraid that it is meant to do much more than _inspire rage_ ,” he explained slowly, eyes flicking between Phil and the staff with a morbid sort of curiosity. Phil nodded slowly.  
“See this cramped area? It has originally been a… a place for a protective rune,” Randolph explained, pointing at the area in question with his finger. “But someone has actually carved it with extra conditions to the original spelled purpose. Same here.”

Phil pulled on a pair of gloves on his own and (with a quick glance to the professor) reached out to trace the carvings with his fingers. He couldn’t really see any marked difference in the quality of the carvings here or there, but maybe the more recently added strokes could have been a bit sharper and deeper. Just a hint newer than the originals. The metal felt oddlywarm through the leather.  
“So what do they say?” he asked Randolph, curious to know what could be worse than adrenaline-boosted fit of rage.  
“Well, this word stands for _galdramaður_. It means a ‘male sorcerer’, or a witch in some contexts. And the other one is an adjective used to emphasize and stress the severity or repetitive nature of the intended use.”  
“So the whole message would be…?” Phil asked, leaving the end of his question hanging. He didn’t really need the professor to figure it out, and for a moment they just looked at each other with uncomfortable sneers.  
“To inspire the sort of intense fight or flight response and loss of moral inhibitions as the regular Berserker staff... But it would be severely emphasized by these runes, and tie it to other witchcraft,” Randolph said blandly. Phil sighed.  
“And that’s worse than just plain ‘inspire rage’, isn’t it?” he asked, and for a moment neither said a thing.

“Think about an electric fence. Not one for guarding horses or sheep but one for… buffalo, maybe. And grab onto that fence with both hands so that the shock goes through you,” Randolph spoke up suddenly, and if that wasn’t the strangest metaphor in a while, Phil didn’t know what. He had never grabbed a buffalo fence, but could imagine a pretty unpleasant feeling.  
“Is the fence inspiring rage in me?” Phil asked. Randolph let out a short laugh.  
“Yes and, unless you’re having a heart attack and die, you’re probably going to remember that feeling for the rest of your life. Quite a rush, the current.”  
“...I would think so.”  
“Then you have an idea of a… supposed berserker staff,” Randolph nodded. Phil frowned. The situation was really getting out of hand.  
“You feel the energy forever and you can use it if necessary. It’ll still rouse your aggressions, but mostly based on the pre-existing feelings after that. You don’t have to keep the electricity running on full power all the time, because the feeling never left,” Randolph said. He turned to regard the staff again and let out a deep breath.  
“But this, this is the sort of fence that’s meant for a dragon. And it’s meant to give you the big shock on a regular basis.”

For a while Phil stood in silence, regarding the previously-so-innocent-looking thing on the workbench

“Alright,” he said, “So... it’s basically a really uncomfortable amped-up version?”  
“Yes,” Randolph agreed with a small shrug and crossed his arms. That sealed the conversation for now.  
“Everybody, heads up! Keep this thing under quarantine,” Phil told the team of scientists that had made room for them.

 

/ / / /

 

The first time Loki had held a Berserker staff was a dark, rainy afternoon. Clouds had blocked the daylight and reduced the gardens and courtyards of Asgard to a gray shadow of her usual self. He remembered it clearly even if that day’s events themselves had been blurred to a messy knot in his memories.  
Not that his thoughts had really been any clearer back then either. He couldn’t remember much. Half of what he had pieced together was based on what others had told him.

He had been told of his true parentage some less than a year before that day, that he remembered clearly, and hadn’t yet managed to forget even if he wanted to. And yes, perhaps he had been the slightest bit upset by it, under the weather if you will, but not that bad. Not that he would have… cried and screamed and curled into a little ball in the weapons vault right under Odin’s eye, or trashed his rooms when Frigga tried to speak to him.  
Not that he would have started picking up fights wherever he could. Or tried to jump off the high bridge along the Old Architect street only to be stopped by Thor tackling him back away from the edge with the full weight of his bulk. Yelling at him to stop and calm down and listen and _look at me brother, I will soak you in my blood if that makes you believe me when I tell you that we are brothers and you my family._

But whatever it was, certainly he hadn’t taken up a new practice just to get his father to say something to him afterwards. Because Odin Allfather hadn’t batted an eye when he told him.  
_“Father. I am going to become a Berserker.”_  
No, it was never a very big step in his life towards any direction. It was just a wish to try something new.

Their weapons tutor Tyr, the great general of the Einherjar, had been there, that much he knew for certain. He remembered the stern eyes when the general had stared into Loki’s own and asked him if he was absolutely certain that he wanted to do it. It must have been a long time ago - Tyr had still had more auburn than grey in his beard. Loki had nodded every time, repeating himself after each nod.  
_“I want this.”_  
He hadn’t truly had the faintest idea of what it was that he supposedly wanted. He couldn’t remember what he had expected when he was offered the chance to use the staff, but he did remember fat raindrops hitting the sandy ground of the practise arena. He had probably taken a hold of the weapon then. He must have, or else he wouldn’t be where he was now.

The raindrops hit his face.

A cold, dark world filled with ice and despair and the smell of blood and fear and death.  
_He would never be like Thor, he could never be like Thor, and it was not fair._

His palms were on fire and the air was kicked out of his lungs.  
_He was despised by all who called him friend, he was so alone and so lost and so scared._

Pain worse than a dwarven needle running up his arms and flaring inside his mind.  
_His eyes were not like his mother’s, because she had never been his mother. She had lied to him for his whole life._

His heart rushing to a gallop so hard that it was racing out of his chest and bleeding from his eyes.  
_Stepson, Laufeyson, jötun breeding stock. Never strong or old or clever or handsome or good or useful enough, never wanted by anyone._

They had been alone in the middle of the arena, but there had been people standing by the fencing and sitting on the stairs all around it. Loki knew the sounds he could let out of his throat when he held the staff, but couldn’t remember if he had screamed out then. He did remember Tyr’s face and the desperate try at calm in his eyes, but not what the general had said to him. He hadn’t heard anything past the rush of blood in his ears.

He had attacked the general then and it had been with the intention to kill. He had never before _really_ wanted to slaughter a man purely on an impulse, but even with his long limbs still gangly like a colt’s he had stormed against Tyr as hard as he could, smashing into him with everything he had. With the staff, with his shoulders, arms and knuckles. Someone had rushed in to rip the staff from his hands, but it hadn’t stopped him from beating with his fists until they bled.

No, he did remember after all. He had screamed. Tyr had clamped his mouth shut with a firm left hand as best he could and Loki had bit through skin and flesh.

Tyr had wrestled him with no hesitation, held him down through the entirety of it, talking to his unhearing ears in a steady, unwavering chain of words after one another. He couldn’t remember what he had said - it could just as well have been a lullaby or a death threat - but he did still appreciate the effort.  
Only after Loki had bent and broken the general’s arm at the elbow, and eventually cracked the bones in his own hand as well, did Tyr grab him into a tight choke hold from behind. He had squeezed down on Loki’s windpipe with his spared arm for so long that Loki must have lost consciousness and stopped fighting.  
They were both helped to the Palace healing rooms. Luckily Tyr’s arm had been fixable.

_“He is too young. Physically able, yes, but this is too dangerous for his psyche.”_

The first thing that Loki could remember when he came to was how scared he had felt. Fear had very quickly turned to pure, unbridled panic, a lump rising into his throat and stinging needles prickling at the back of his eyes. It had felt like the entire room was caving in and suffocating him, crushing his ribcage, and he could hear the crunch of bone clearly in his mind. The bloodstream running through him was cold and rushed and had made him feel sick.  
It took him a while before he could force himself to focus on the honey-yellow drapes and linens in the room. The golden sunlit colour, same as the hair of Thor’s and mother’s, had seeped into his memory and would likely stay there forever.  
The next thing he had noticed was how empty his head was feeling. There was a thrum in the tips of his fingers and toes and a throb in his chest from where his heart was still beating like mad. Inside his head, however, was but a beautiful empty silence. He hadn’t been able to wrap his head around a thing even if he tried to. And it felt good. He loved it. The pulse he felt beating in thick throbs in his throat and deep in his guts. 

His mother sitting beside the bed with carefully hidden emotions was only the third thing he noticed, and for that he was still sorry, after all those years. Her mouth and her brows were tight lines, pinched with worry, though nowadays Loki suspected that she had always looked a little bit like that when she thought of him. Still did.  
That day she had let her golden hair tumbling freely down her shoulders, shrouding her narrow shoulders that nearly shook from tension. And as she sat there alone, on a small chair in a white and purple gown of loose sleeves and messily layered skirts, she looked like she had kept watch for as long as he had been under. When she stood up and stepped closer, lifting a hand, he had flinched so badly that he had almost ended up kicking her.

When his mother had finally laid her warm hand on his forehead, he had crumbled. She had been so worried and he had been the one to cause her the discomfort. And she didn’t even hold him for blame.  
_“You have a slight fever, Loki,”_ she had whispered reassuringly to him, _“We are lucky ‘tis nothing you haven’t endured before.”_  
He was already almost a man back then, at least as tall as other warriors if not yet as thick of limbs and neck. He had broken down, weeping, and had clung to his mother like a little child unable to form a single coherent word of apology. And she had held him in her arms.  
Had smoothed his hair and hugged him tightly even when the healers and their apprentices had come by to check on his state.

It had taken a week of talking with his tutors and healers and another one of training without arms or opponents to convince Tyr that he was in condition to try again. After that he had to practice hand-to-hand combat with Thor or some of the warriors from the last actual Berserker campaign that had ended a month or so ago. Rehearse those drills with a more philosophical core to regain self-restraint.  
He knew that it must have been the biggest disappointment he ever caused Frigga, when he finally tried again.

The second time was markedly better - it didn’t hurt half as much, he only broke an arrogant man’s nose, and Tyr and Thor laughed from the sidelines when the battle ended. He was already yelling and screaming death threats for the insult before realising that they were actually laughing at his opponent and not him.  
It was good. His mind was ablaze but the ashes were cool and light. The thrum in his veins was spurring him on.

In time he learned to long for the pain impaling him that had come with the first rush of power. The way it shook his whole being down into to the deepest bone-marrow, and roused all the doubt and anger he had buried away. It made him feel more real somehow, letting it all flash right through him with every heartbeat as if he had a burning star inside his ribcage. And he loved the cool silence inside his head that came after.  
Later, when he grew a bit older, even the pain dulled and left him feeling frustrated. Missing the intensity. The rush of force and adrenaline.

Eventually, instead of bruises and the attention that came with them, he started to chase after the calm he was losing. And he did find a few ways to carve new runes.

 

/ / / /

 

At first it was but a shadow, but as soon as Thor blinked again, he was looking at his brother. Still pale and tired, but in a way that was not unusually bad anymore. The sharp lines around his eyes were not so dark.  
“I am not here, if anyone else should look in your direction,” Loki said, leaning against the wall of the small holding cell. Or not, Thor couldn’t really say how real his brother’s projection was. Maybe he was only pretending to be leaning to seem less like a projected image and more like they were actually talking to each other. Thor nodded slowly, trying to keep his own slouching posture same as it had been.  
“I’m glad to see you’re well again,” he said softly, even if he didn’t know how much of Loki’s current shape was bent to seem different than it was. Loki frowned at him and twisted his mouth, but then he rolled his eyes. Luckily it was a gentle sneer, not a venomous one. Thor gave his brother a smile he knew would annoy him.  
“As am I. We’ve landed somewhere and I fear that the vessel has long since left Stockholm behind us. How fast is Mjölnir, again?” Loki muttered, but lifted a hand, “No, don’t say a thing. It’s better not to give them any unnecessary knowledge they might use.”  
“I was about to say the same. Fast enough, should we need it,” Thor huffed and held back a smile. He looked at the door of his cage, half transparent and half blocked with horizontal beams that held it close - or so he suspected. He could hear someone walking in the hallway, but they didn’t seem to be coming any closer to the cell.

“Why are you here?” Thor asked, folding his hands together on his lap and looking at Loki again. Not that he could do much else with the infuriating handcuffs. As much as he missed his armour and wished that he had it on, he was also relieved to see that they were both stripped of the bulk of their outer layers, and didn’t have to sit simmering and suffocating in their small cells with all of the layers on. As soon as he had Mjölnir in his hand again he could channel its force and summon the armor, and Loki always managed to tend to himself.  
Loki didn’t answer immediately. Thor rather hoped that his brother would have assumed thicker clothes right then. He looked so skinny without his coat. Thinking back, Thor could almost swear that he seemed to have been getting a little bit thinner in the recent years. Of course Loki was no less strong and wiry as he had been before, no, but there was a new sort of edge to his knuckles and cheeks that had developed rather quickly. Thor didn’t particularly like what he saw. Wasn’t it so that Loki had also begun turning more and more inwards when they spent time with their friends?  
Then again, Thor had spent somewhat less time with Loki in the recent past than usual. The nearing coronation took up most of his time. And now it was all halted due to this Gem problem.  
Looking at Loki’s silent projection leaning against the wall must have been the first time in almost a year that they had actually talked. Well, of course Thor had talked to Loki, during meals and political gatherings, and greeted him with a warm clap on the shoulder or cheek whenever they met, and they had sparred too. It was good. Verily so. But other than that… no. They hadn’t really seen each other at all.  
It saddened Thor - it was like they were standing on thin spring ice, and he knew that it would crack and crumble and break away any minute now. He didn’t know whether or not he could still reach his brother if something happened to that small sliver of a rift.

“I doubt you would use up your craft just to pay me a few niceties during the day, Loki,” Thor said in a low tone, hardly even voicing the words to keep as much of their conversation hidden as he could. Loki blinked like he had just woken up.  
“No, I most certainly wouldn’t,” he agreed with a dull snort, focusing on the conversation again. “There is, however, a lingering spell in here that I have sensed.”  
“A spell?” Thor frowned, his personal worries changed for those regarding their quest.  
“I never thought that Midgard had any competent sorcerers,” he said, but Loki shushed him.  
“I never said that a mortal magician was to blame, Thor” he said as if it should have been obvious from his vague statement, “And I don’t think that it is. But I have to look into the… thread again before I can say anything for certain. I just wanted to let you know.”  
“Very well. Thank you, brother,” Thor nodded. And then they fell silent, leaning on their respective sides of the cell within an arm’s length from each other.  
Loki didn’t leave immediately, and for that Thor was grateful.

“Loki…?” he asked slowly when a thought came to him. His brother lifted a curious brow at him.  
“Yes?” Loki asked, and his image seemed to become a hint more solid and sharp again, when engaged within a conversation.  
“Have you been able to dispose of the manacles?” Thor mouthed, pulling at the cuffs around his wrists a bit.  
“Why do you ask that?” Loki frowned, nodding pointedly at his own wrists, which certainly hadn’t looked so bound mere moments ago. Thor sighed. Of course his brother would be vain enough to mask away his handcuffs when they were _both imprisoned._  
“Mine are stronger than I thought mortals would manufacture,” he huffed and hoped dearly that Loki’s appearance was not otherwise prettied up, and that he wasn’t actually still sitting alone with dark rings around his eyes and blotches of dead white and flustered red on his face.  
“Then why do you ask if I have broken mine?” Loki drawled with enough spirit to push the worry aside for the time being. A small crease formed between his brows when he gave Thor an unhappy smile. “We do both know that your arms are somewhat thicker than mine, do we not, and that you are strongest in all Asgard.”  
“I just thought that you might have… slipped through,” Thor huffed and shook his head. He wasn’t fishing for angry comments but of course Loki had to take every word as an insult. As a scolding from an older brother.

“Well, certainly there is some wiggle room around the wrists,” Loki said, so enthusiastically and lightly that it made the hairs on Thor’s arms stand up with discomfort, and turned his hands around as if actually measuring the space between skin and metal. Already then Thor knew that he had managed to voice his thoughts with wrong words.  
“But still I’d have to _break both of my thumbs_ , and perhaps the base of my palm, to slip my hands through the cuffs. And I’d lief not,” Loki added, and even though a tight smile had crawled up on his lips, Thor didn’t hear any good humour in his voice anymore.  
“What do you mean?” he heard himself asking despite the obvious signs not to. If Loki was already in good enough shape to duplicate himself to another space so corporeally and track spells around him, surely he couldn’t still be having problems with his witchcraft. Could he? Loki frowned at him like his question had made no sense.  
“You can’t… do that trick where you disappear into the air and…” Thor asked again, trying to make some sort of gesture with his hands that would convey his meaning. Loki’s mouth opened like he was about to say something, but in the end he just stared at Thor for a while.

“Disappear into -” Loki cut himself off, jaw slack and brows nearly reaching his hairline. Then he laughed, a very short and sharp sound like that of a hissing snake. No matter how audible it was or wasn’t to people outside his cage, Thor found it unsettling. The laughter was short-lived and Loki’s expression changed again to an enraged blankness.  
Thor knew only three people in all the Nine Realms who managed such a look, and they were Loki, father and mother. Why he had never achieved it he couldn’t say.  
“Thor, you _cannot_ be serious,” Loki started slowly, and Thor braced himself for the following bark in advance.  
“How on this _mortal soil_ do you think that I would be able to _teleport out of my handcuffs_?” Loki snapped, standing up straighter and leaning closer to him, “I am bound!”  
“You teleport out of buildings as well,” Thor grumbled, facing Loki’s stare steadily. The schooled emptiness melted away and Loki rolled his eyes with a long, angry sigh.  
“This is not like that,” he hissed. The sideways look he shot at Thor was odd, but perhaps not entirely as outraged as his reactions portrayed.  
“How can it not work like that? You disappear somewhere. How do the handcuffs follow if they’re not consciously holding on to you?” Thor asked as silently as he could, holding back a small laugh. He could see the moment Loki took the bait and got himself worked up again. 

Since when had they been so unable to talk to each other like normal people did?

“I am not disappearing!” Loki snapped and pointed a finger at him.  
“It isn’t… is not like… Thor,” he said, lifting his hands in front of him to point them accusingly at Thor, “If I was standing handcuffed behind a curtain, I could step through where the drapes part. But I could _not step out of my handcuffs_ in the same motion.”  
Thor did his best to keep from laughing out loud alone in the middle of a seemingly empty cell. He nodded with a warm smile.  
“All right. Can you break them then?” he asked and could see the corner of Loki’s lip twitching.  
“Again, Thor, you are the one -”  
“If I could break these so could you, brother. You know what I meant. And I meant that you do so with your spells, or perhaps just… lock-pick them. Whatever it is that you do,” he explained and glanced at Loki with a raised brow. His brother sighed at first, but the bored expression was followed with a more conspiratorial look.  
“Do you need me to?” Loki asked with a covert hint of a smile. Thor shook his head a little. Not yet. Loki seemed to understand and they fell into a more relaxed silence than before.

Something was different.

“You’ve cut your hair again,” Thor muttered slowly, and by Odin’s beard, how could he notice it so late? Loki frowned at him. For days already he had seen his brother and held council with him about their little quest, and never before had he noticed just what it was that felt so off. The sharp cut made Loki seem younger again, boyish even, but also added to the thinner, sharper look Loki had gained. (Or took away from the stronger, more satisfied look that he had still had a year or two ago.)  
“You sported it much longer when we visited Vanaheim,” Thor added quickly to keep Loki from misinterpreting his words as malice again. Loki tilted his head stiffly to one side as if in a shrug.  
“Too long. It was starting to curl again. Tangle. The way it does,” he explained curtly, and it sounded like he had been sincerely upset, before nodding and letting his voice flow in a more pleasant and placating manner. "And it would have become terribly unpractical on this campaign. Though I see that you still battle only to look pretty,” he added, with a pointed look towards his brother’s long, loose hair.  
“That I do,” Thor chuckled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's back! 
> 
> I really like writing Thor, I should probably do that more. I am really excited about this chapter because now I have a little base on which to start growing all the magic in this verse.
> 
> (Och till alla Stockholmbor, jag är ledsen för fredag den 7 april, och ja tror på er alla - den här historien började innan katastrofen.)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where are all these civilians coming from? A team forms inside the pre-existin team amd we prepare for moving the prisoners.

It was six in the morning when they’d been called up to wherever Erik had been half-kidnapped. It was not a good time of day to wake Darcy up.

A smiling average man in a black average suit ( _‘I’m agent Phil Coulson of SHIELD, nice to meet you’_ ) with a black average car had come to pick them up, and when Jane had packed up her research materials and latest notes Darcy had shoved a taser into her bag, next to the headphones. No way in hell was she climbing into the back of a stranger’s sedan unarmed.  
Erik was there when they got out of the car, in front of a small nondescript industrial building made of red brick. He asked them how they were doing and started to tell them about all kinds of things. Every now and then Agent Coulson silenced him with a funny look.  
They were led inside, through long corridors, underground, past secret doors… agents were everywhere, Erik told of how a policeman was beaten to death, and Darcy was really really scared by the time they reached the lab.

“Doctor Foster, it’s a pleasure to meet you, really,” a mousy-looking science man said with a small smile when he and Jane shook hands. He had dark, curly hair and a pair glasses that were slipping down his nose, and with the white lab coat he looked the epitome of a scientist. A really friendly and harmless mad scientist.  
“No, no, Doctor Banner, my pleasure, your work within the field of radiation is actually amazing,” Jane hastily replied.  
“Mm… and what good did it bring me,” the man laughed, “I hear that you’re our key to unlocking intergalactic travel and wormhole studies in practise. I’d say that’s something.” And Darcy didn’t even try to follow the conversation after that.  
“I have to be off,” Agent Coulson said and looked at his watch (seriously, who even used a wrist watch anymore) before turning to leave. The door opened and another man in black stepped in.  
“Agent Barton will be keeping an eye on things.”

Darcy had never been that much of a science girl, not science science anyway. Sure she liked learning things and she had always aced her language studies - Spanish and even the tiniest bit of Mandarin - and she didn’t suck at maths either. Even if she loved her occasional space adventure movies, she kinda zoned out whenever Jane went over the edge of high school science to the side of mad professor maths. But it was okay, she was happy with doing the regular interning stuff that most interns did. Scanning, coffee...

...watching from behind a bulletproof glass when a team of scientists approached an open metal case that had a glowing, blue thing in it. Just the regular afternoon, everyone was wearing ridiculous protective gear and talking to each other about the Cube of Scare casually like it were a lego. It was creepy as heck.

“What is that?” she asked, and based on the surprised jolts her sound was better audible on the other side of the glass than it was to her own ears. A hidden microphone somewhere, then.  
“I’m told it’s classified and probably from outer space,” Tony fracking Stark’s voice replied through a speaker, casually and without a care in the world. Darcy blinked only once in surprise, and it was a good achievement.  
“But it’s called the Tesseract. Or the… uh… Bruce, what did the roleplay team call it? The Gem? Jewel?” Stark continued and one of the people under protective layers shrugged, so it was probably Dr Banner.  
“Okay. And… it’s apparently a crazy power source that the nazis used to try and create weapons of mass destruction. Then my dad gave it to SHIELD to try and do the same,” Tony Stark added cheerily, and seemed way more interested in the Blue Cube of Doom than what dangerous and classified secrets he was spilling. There was a weird sort of scanner thing in Doctor Banner’s hand that beeped a lot, and Stark and Jane and Erik were handling some sort of… sticks made specifically for this job with sciencey names Darcy had already forgotten. They were trying to redetermine the radioactivity and electromagnetic specifics of the thing and compare them to some notes from the fifties, that much she knew, but... A nazi space cube. Nice.

“Okay, thanks,” Darcy said back to Tony Stark, and she didn’t even know if she was supposed to be shocked or scared anymore. Yeah, probably, but when life gives you lemons and puts you in the middle of a sci-fi movie, you don’t throw those lemons away. She crossed her arms over her chest.  
“Do you want me to write something down?” she asked. Jane noped quickly over the speakers but Doctor Banner spoke up.  
“We can review the readings from these later on a computer,” he said calmly and Darcy nodded, impressed by the steadiness of his voice in such a weird situation. The digitalized world was really killing her internship because she had no paperwork to do. Then again, she wouldn’t be an intern for a space scientist if there were no computers. Crap.  
“But it’s interesting to see how much higher the levels of potential energy and radiation seem to have been when Howard Stark found this thing,” Banner added, though he was probably thinking out loud more than talking to Darcy anymore.  
“You think it’s working in cycles?” Erik asked, and then they talked about science again.

“So, you have space nazis locked up somewhere then?” Darcy asked after a while. If the grumpy-looking male agent at the door hadn’t already glared at her, now he was looking really displeased, both of his muscled arms tensing. Luckily he said nothing. Agent… B-something.  
“Darcy, it’s not -” Erik tried to say, but Stark beat him to it.  
“Yeah, maybe. We picked up two weirdos from Stockholm,” he shrugged, “One was tall and the other was taller, and judging by their talk they fit the ‘proud germanic superman’ mindset pretty well. And that’s about the only Earthly frame they fit into,” Stark chatted on like it was the weather. Darcy nodded slowly before realising that they were still looking at the cube and wouldn’t see it.  
“Okay. Sounds nasty,” she said, and someone laughed on the other side of the glass. Maybe it was Jane.  
“I wouldn’t worry about them. At least not more than about this thing here. SHIELD hiring a man who is known for doing pretty weird science and someone who came up with the Foster theorem to work on this research project seems more than a little fishy,” Stark said.  
“They also have a weapons specialist here,” doctor Banner added pointedly.  
“Mm… Yeah, but they can’t afford to hire me. I’m here because I’m curious.”

“Stark, the next time you’re about to say something, I will get Fury on the line,” the agent at the door grumbled suddenly, scaring Darcy shitless. It didn’t sound as formal as she had heard the other agents speaking, but in all truth that would have been even creepier.  
“Yeah, no problem, Birdie, I’d like to ask the pirate a few things anyway,” was the answer.  
“She’s not in the project,” the guy Stark called Birdie answered and looked even grumpier than before. Darcy would have congratulated him for the greatest resting bitchface in existence if he hadn’t creeped her out so much. Tony Stark laughed through the speakers.  
“Neither is Cap, and still you and femme fatale are playing detectives with him. Don’t try to make this a SHIELD business when it’s not,” he said.  
“You think this is Avengers business?” Doctor Banner asked, and Darcy was getting some really weird vibes. Wait...  
“If this is Avengers business I have the right to say and do whatever I want to,” Stark said, “Including teasing Robin Hood.”  
“Oh… So you’re the - uh - the Arrow Guy!” Darcy blurted out and pointed at the Arrow Guy whose actual super hero name was probably something else, “From the Avengers!”  
“...thanks,” the Arrow Guy scoffed. This time it was Tony Stark who laughed. Darcy tried to smile a little but he went back to the door guard mode. Apparently the readings were all taken and science done for now because the team started to pack their things up and come out of the super secure room of the Cube of Scare.

  


/ / / /

  


“Sir, Stark has let Doctor Foster’s team in on classified information of Project Dark Energy. He’s also briefing them about the Stockholm problem.”  
“Amazing. This is an even worse mess than I thought. Remind me again why SHIELD is still working with the Starks.”  
“Because we need the expertise, sir.”  
“Yeah, thank you big time for that, Coulson... Try to keep the shop up and running until I get there.”  
“You’re welcome, Director. Will do. We’re moving the problem in soon.”

  


/ / / /

  


Darcy was drumming her nails against the table counter. She really should have painted them again before they left, the purple was already cracked and flaky. It would just have to wait until the sci-fi movie that framed her life would end and let her return to normal.  
“But, are you serious?” Jane asked, raising her forehead from her hands and leaving a red print on her skin, when they were again sitting around a lab desk in one of the secret headquarters’ secret labs without any extra agents. Just Doctor Banner, Tony Stark and the three of them. Stark was right, they were a really weird pick. He lifted his brows and looked up from a file.  
“Mm… very rarely. Depends on the occasion, really,” he deadpanned and Darcy muffled a snort. It was a really stupid joke, and Jane didn’t take the bait.  
“I’m talking about the Tesseract. Is this really such a dangerous project that… you're not here only for the research?” Jane asked. Erik looked a little pale and pulled a face like he had swallowed something slimy.  
“Didn’t you get any briefing?” Banner asked slowly from across the lab, where he was working through some of their data on a very impractical but very cool transparent screen.  
“Nope,” Darcy answered, “A black car just kidnapped us from our own lab.” She didn’t really know why, but everything transparent and super agent-like stuff seemed to be the trend around here. Way to be inconspicuous.  
“Agent Coulson or someone like that,” Jane said and Tony Stark grinned with an ‘oh yeah, I know him’. Jane shrugged and plowed on: “We’ve seen the Stockholm clips though.”  
“And I told them a little about that. I was there for a while,” Erik added.  
Stark nodded, but didn’t answer right away. For a moment everyone fell really silent, and Darcy kept waiting for someone to say somethin. It felt more than a little uncomfortable even though she had already grown used to some random Swedish stretches of zero talk from Erik. That was different.

“Yeah, I flew in to wrap things up with Captain America,” Stark said after a face of deep thought. He seemed surprisingly hesitant. Not at all like Darcy would have expected from his press appearances and official Avengers stuff.  
“I mean… it wasn’t pretty, but this is also nothing like the crackpot criminals we have usually dealt with. Right Bruce?” he asked. There was a short pause.  
“Well, it’s not very clean,” Doctor Banner agreed, “They don’t seem to really care about the ‘how’ part of reaching their goal,” he said and looked at Stark before closing the screen with a sigh.  
“But...?” Jane asked and frowned a little.  
“But it’s not sloppy and reckless either because they, you know, they seem pretty tough. I mean, the guy puts up with Captain Rogers in a fist fight. They have mean weapons and we have no idea about the tech that powers them… they can afford the arrogance,” he added with a tired laugh and small hand gesture. Darcy couldn’t really blame him for letting the visual aids drop and flap against his sides, because she had no idea what was going on, and really doubted that even then she would have understood a thing.  
“Wait,” she said and frowned at Doctor Banner. Something didn’t add up.  
“Which Avenger are you? I haven’t seen you on tv.”

The silence changed into a very different kind of tense. Tony Stark let out a sudden laugh that was either fake or a bit hysterical, and turned to point both index fingers at the doctor with a wide grin.  
“Can I tell them?” he asked, suddenly forcing a fake serious expression on his face, “I’m really professional about these things, super professional. I was the first one to make this a profession, Bruce, you know that. Cap doesn’t count,” he argued, swiveling around in his chair. Doctor Banner leaned against a desk with a long sigh and apparently wasn’t going to even try and stop him from saying something like -  
“You know the green King Kong that tags along with the rest of us? The one who always beats the worst villains? You’re looking right at him,” Stark presented with the perfect tv-salesman smile. Doctor Banner groaned a little _and holy shit he was the Hulk_?

Darcy wasn’t sure how long she stared at the man with her mouth hanging open, but it must have been pretty long because Tony Stark was running out of breath while laughing at her.  
“Thanks, Tony,” Doctor Banner said after a while, but luckily didn’t sound very angry. He was a super chill dude. Way too chill for being the Hulk. What the crap?  
“Doesn’t that hurt like hell?” she asked but clamped her mouth shut quickly.  
“Darcy!” Erik and Jane both exclaimed.  
“I’m sorry! Really, Doctor Banner, I’m honestly real sorry,” Darcy apologised hurriedly, and sweet Jesus, how could she even let the first thoughts on her mind escape her _like that_.  
“No, you don’t have to,” Banner replied slowly. He didn’t look happy but luckily not very angry either. “It’s okay, that’s… actually one of the nicest things people have asked. But I… let’s not go into that.”  
“Yeah, okay…” Darcy nodded firmly, “Sorry.”  
For a while the five of them haltingly talked about the Avengers, but apparently there were many things about your super hero team you just didn’t say aloud.

“I need to talk to those two guys. Men. Aliens?” Jane told everyone after they had deemed that yes, the cube emitted very low levels of gamma radiation, wasn’t directly harmful to be in a room with but probably otherwise very dangerous, and was also very unsafe to touch with bare hands. Burning and melting skin and flesh, according to a hastily scribbled note from the 1960s.  
She brought stunned silence with her. Tony Stark’s eyebrows were nearly in his hairline and Doctor Banner shook his head. Erik took a deep breath.  
“Jane, maybe we shouldn’t,” he sighed.  
“Yeah, excuse me, no,” Stark said and shook his head fervently, perhaps exaggerating his expression a bit, “No one is going to talk to those lunatics. We don’t know anything about them. I almost died.”  
“You just said that things were wrapped up?” Jane asked.  
“Yeah, and still the street was on fire!” he said back.  
“Shouldn’t the lack of knowledge be a very good reason to talk to them?” Jane asked, not faltering for a second. Darcy looked at her and heard Erik sighing again, this time very loudly.  
“If they really came from another planet after a ‘stone’ that turns out to be an infinite energy source, I’d bet my right hand they have a use for it as well. And I want to know what it is.”

For a stiff moment no one said a thing. Darcy took a deep breath and looked at Jane in the hopes of seeing what drove her to such decisions.  
“That’s kinda dangerous, isn’t it?” she asked and Jane shrugged.  
“I want to know more about the scientific properties of the Tesseract, and I believe them to know more about it than we do,” she replied firmly. Darcy raised a brow.  
“Assuming they’re aliens,” she asked and looked at Jane pointedly, but her boss just smiled. It was that small Janey smile that said that she had already made up her mind.  
“When all of our readings have been going haywire and people appear from nowhere claiming to be aliens, I think the best hypothesis would be to regard them as aliens, until they prove to be human,” Jane said and pointed toward the charts they had printed.  
“Besides, it’s not like anyone other than SHIELD should know about the Tesseract, right? Because it came from space.” Tony Stark shrugged and Erik sighed and Dr Banner looked deep in thought. When put like that, Darcy didn’t think that the idea was all bad.  
“Okay. So we’re also throwing around a theory that there’s… an ancient alien race that some ancient viking people would have… seen as gods?” she asked.  
“Well… yeah?” Jane nodded.  
“Okay. Sounds legit.”

“I am actually going to help a lab team run a few DNA tests later today, because the first try was a bit unsure,” Banner spoke up, “We’re comparing them to a few different genes from SHIELD’s superhuman samples. Trying to see if they’re just on steroids or if they’re… something else,” he added.  
“I think I could try to get you a chance to interrogate them,” Stark shrugged when he stood up. “Not alone though, but maybe with Cap and Black Widow. We could maybe do with the funny professor Coulson dragged into this mess.”

  


/ / / /

  


“Hello again. We would like to ask your assistance on a thing,” Natasha greeted with a smile when she stopped in front of so-called Loki’s cell. He looked as calm and collected as he had for the entire span of his visit as he stood up, and tilted his head gracefully, waiting for what she had to say. A mild-mannered smile found its way on his thin lips expectantly.  
“Truly?” he asked with a gentle tone. Wasn’t he a charmer.

“We are moving you to a non-mobile location, and there is a civilian interrogation planned for you and Thor,” she explained calmly, and he just raised a brow. Kept smiling instead of nodding to let her know he understood or even snapping something angry about interrogations. She wondered not for the first time why it was that she always got the craziest ones.  
“So we would need you to change into something a bit more prison-standard to make sure everything goes according to our protocols. You could still be hiding another pair of knives under that shirt,” Natasha said and nodded towards him. The expression he wore made it look like she had just said they would be serving his least favorite food for dinner and not demanded that he strip down for his jailers’ wishes. Just a mild show of distaste with no real feeling behind it.  
“Also, we will be wanting a few new tissue samples, the bit of blood on Captain America's shield was not much,” Natasha added slowly even though Coulson had told her not to, trying to provoke a reaction. Loki looked at her for a long while and said nothing.

“I am afraid I have to decline your offer, however interesting it sounds,” he answered smoothly, smiling a bright and polite smile that made him look much younger. After that he had the nerve to pull up an apologetic face. _Alright._ Natasha answered it with a mirroring smile of her own.  
“You just won me a bet with that,” she smirked to herself, lifting a hand to her earbud. “In any case, I thought it would be fair to let you know in advance. You have twenty minutes to accept the offer before the thugs get here and we will drag you out,” she said out loud and let the smile drop. His didn’t, but he shook his head and turned around to sit back on the narrow cot at the far wall of the cell like it was the comfiest chair in the entire world.

“You do realize that I’m giving you a chance to be safe from any more embarrassment?” she asked after a silent staring match of a solid two minutes.  
“No,” he simply answered, seeming awfully sure of his toughness and authority when he added, “You’re trying to save yourself,” and spread his legs wider. Natasha took a deep breath through her nose.  
“What did I say,” Natasha murmured into the comms for Coulson and internally rolled her eyes. Loki really had the arrogance to match the legs any model would envy. Could have done without it.  
“We’re sending in the escorts for your date,” Coulson said.

Loki didn’t do anything except looked at her with a pair of sharp, pale eyes. She had long since stopped wondering what people thought they saw when they looked at her, because whatever it was it was wrong. He seemed to enjoy guessing, though. Even when a throng of armed agents stopped at Natasha’s side his gaze stayed on her.  
“Get up,” barked a familiar female agent to her left. Brookes. They had worked on an infiltration job six months ago and she was on the Stockholm team.  
“What makes you think I will?” Loki asked, still looking at Natasha.  
“Maybe you’re just nice like that. I’m not asking twice,” Brookes said and nodded for the rest of the agents when she slammed in the door code. The door of the cell slid open with a hissing sound but the man inside hardly batted an eye.

“Get him out,” Brookes snapped. Natasha glanced along the hallway, glad to find the door at the end firmly shut. Two men stepped inside to yank the guy up, and to her eyes it seemed like his shifted balance from the heavy cuffs was their only advantage. Once they took the few steps to the threshold, however, Loki stopped, and for such a skinny-looking guy he must have weighed a ton. He wasn’t moving an inch.  
One of the agents kicked the back of his knees and went to grab him by the neck to bring him down, but he was faster. His arms were like a snake when he caught the agent's throat in a squeeze, moving very little. There was a loud ‘whoa’ from one of the agents and the man scrambling in Loki’s hold flushed in panic when he realized that the hold wouldn’t break.

“Hands off!” Brookes barked. Natasha raised her pistol even though she knew it would do hardly any damage.  
“Now,” she commanded slowly.  
"Shall you cease your assault or shall I go on with mine?" Loki growled, turning to look at them instead of the agent whose throat he was slowly starting to squeeze tighter. Who was the damned idiot to leave his hands handcuffed _in front of his body._  
“The darts in these guns will zap you with a nice electric current strong enough to be used as a taser on normal folks. They also carry a sedative about five times stronger than the one we used on your brother back there in Stockholm. If I were you, I’d get my ass out of there and do as I’m told,” Brookes said and loaded her own weapon. Loki narrowed his eyes at her, but as the rest followed her example with their weapons, he loosened his hold slightly.  
“So either we shoot you and drag you to the lab unconscious, or you let go of Agent Lindblom right now and come along on your own two feet. Maybe even have a little say in what’s done to you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi again! Thank you for the lovely feedback. I know that this chapter is plotwise somewhat slower, but the extra was necessary so we can get on business in the next chapters. And yay for introducing Jane's science team, finally!
> 
> Let me know what you thought, I'm already working on chapter six!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now all we have to do is drag the prisoners to their actual cells instead of the helicarrier, and also Steve and Nat are really suspicious.  
> So are the prisoners.

“Agent Romanoff,” Steve greeted when he closed the door behind him and saw her red hair. The smaller half of the interrogation room had little else in terms of furniture than a desk and a chair, and judging by her hovering close to the other door she hadn’t been sitting in it.  
“Steve. How are you feeling?” she asked when he stopped next to her. Steve smiled a little. It was good to know that they had finally reached first-name basis after the year or so he had been awake from the ice. 

Steve glanced at the tight band-aid on the crook of his elbow.  
“They took a bit of blood and ripped a few hairs off my head. I think I’ll manage,” Steve promised Natasha, trying to lift the mood. Her mouth twisted a little and there was something amused in her expression, but then she blinked slow and returned to judging the happenings in front of them. A lot of uncomfortable wrestling and shouting.  
“I would have thought to get the same response from him. That he’d manage,” Natasha nodded with a surprisingly relaxed humor, considering they were inside yet another SHIELD mission facility. Steve had seen many already, it seemed like they entered a new base with nearly every mission that required more than the Helicarrier alone. Natasha was rarely very trusting inside any of the bases.  
Steve wasn’t feeling overjoyed about it either. Sometimes he thought about the number of secret buildings and safehouses the organization must have had. Other times the sheer number of places he already knew was too large to wrap his head around.

“Brookes’s team and Clint are working with Thor now. Surprisingly enough, they seem to be doing a lot better than we are,” Natasha said, and Steve thought about the only way they had made that guy easy to handle. Not a happy thought, dragging around an unconscious goliath like that.  
“How long have they been going on at it?” Steve asked instead, pointing at their own problem.  
“Twenty minutes or so. Everyone’s starting to get tired already,” Natasha answered.  
“Oh, really,” Steve huffed, "Who would have thought."

The other room they were watching from behind a reinforced window was in full chaos.  
A chair was thrown to a corner. One of its steel legs was bent in a way that looked like someone had hit it hard against a wall - or maybe the one-way mirror, Steve could see a long scratch there.  
Five agents were physically hanging on to their target’s limbs and frame as he tried to twist around and shake them off. Shortest one had a black eye and one of them limped. One man was actually more or less wrapped around their opponent’s torso like a monkey. It was all they could do to keep him unbalanced enough to find no purchase for movement from the floor or the restraining hold.  
Loki himself didn’t seem to appreciate it at all, which didn’t really surprise Steve. The guy could put up a fight, that he knew, but he couldn’t deny that the struggle was looking very uncomfortable and overpowered.

“At some point everyone’s hands started slipping through him,” Natasha said quietly.  
“What?” Steve asked and turned to look at her instead. For a moment he thought that it was just another new slang phrase he hadn’t picked up yet, but she was looking very serious.  
“I don’t know what it was, but I saw it happen. Straight through his arms like they were grabbing at a ghost,” she shrugged without taking her eyes off the troubling wrestling match inside. “Like they were grabbing at a ghost.” Steve glanced back inside as well.  
“What’s with the…?” he started to ask, but didn’t find a perfect word immediately. A scarf or a bandage was wrapped tightly across Loki’s lower face so that it covered his whole mouth and jaw, and judging by his flared nostrils and heaving chest there was no way he was breathing through the knot in his mouth.  
“The gag?” she supplied, and Steve nodded.  
“It turned out to be the only thing that stopped the… slipping. For now. Agent Martinez clamped his mouth shut when he started screaming threats and obscenities. It worked, so I gave them the permission to do away with it,” Natasha said. Her tone changed to a more wry one when she admitted, “Not a very neat and pretty choice, I give you that, but neither is the situation.”  
“Sometimes you’ve just got to do what it takes,” Steve nodded slowly. Natasha was a spy and he had already come to terms with the fact that there were great differences in their worldview. But he did enjoy her company.  
And sometimes he even felt that the grey areas she saw in between black and white actually made Natasha easier to talk to than the rest of their team. She understood the difference between public and personal, and between preference and necessity.

The thrashing and the raised voices stilled eventually with Loki more or less hoisted up from touching the floor completely. He was heaving in a breath after another through his nose, and looking around with wild eyes, but luckily it was nothing like what Steve had seen in Stockholm. Someone asked him about him finally giving up, and eventually the man fell limp in the agents’ hands. It turned out that without the added tension Loki was a lot heavier to carry around, since an agent almost dropped his hold on his leg.  
After a few deep breaths Loki closed his eyes in resignation and lifted his open palms up as far as they would go in their hold. The look he aimed at the general direction of the one-way mirror was a wry one.

“Let’s go in,” Natasha said and nodded towards the sliding door that separated their side from the other room. Steve followed after her. Loki was hoisted upright to a standing position, but he kept his hands up all the same. After all the struggle and with seven people against him he seemed to think surrender the best course of action.

“The last time I asked, you said no,” Natasha said, this time with her cool and distant voice, which still had Steve’s skin crawling. Loki didn’t react, or even act like he understood what Natasha was saying for that matter, but at least he looked at them.  
“I’m going to ask you again. Nod for a ‘yes’, shake your head for a ‘no’. Do you understand?” Natasha asked and Steve took his place by the wall, standing next to the one-way mirror. Loki looked at her for a moment with a very stubborn crease between his brows, but nodded after a short sigh through his nose. A very slow and small movement, but still.  
“Are you going to change into the clothes we have brought for you on your own? Or do we need to have these agents hold you still while Captain Rogers takes that… tunic off of you? Answer only the first one,” Natasha asked firmly.  
Steve met Loki’s eyes for a tense few seconds, relieved to find him looking equally uncomfortable with the thought of wrestling over a shirt. He didn’t exactly jump at the chance to be a part of something like that. In the end the black-haired man rolled his eyes and nodded more visibly. Natasha inclined her head politely, and the agents let go of Loki so quickly that he had trouble regaining his balance for a moment.

If Steve could have known what was going on in the man’s head at that moment, he would have been a lot wiser. Loki just smiled at nothing - if Steve read the creasing corners of his eyes correctly - and cleared out all emotion from the visible half of his face. He took a deep breath as he reached for the interlocking weaves and flaps of his clothes and started to strip them off.  
Steve didn’t know what he had expected, but he was surprised all the same. When the long-sleeved shirt was off, Loki tossed it carelessly to one of the agents standing around him. 

His hands and forearms were completely covered in pale, winding scars. Some of them were old and faded, others still a faint red colour. 

Natasha shot Steve a quick look, apparently just as puzzled as he was. The first thought on Steve’s mind was _deliberately done_ , and he was met with a nod as he mouthed the words. There was no way that markings like that were the result of an accidental injury. The scars were clean and flat and pale, thin bands curving around Loki’s long fingers and bony wrists and up over his elbows, forming crossing patterns on his skin. They looked like they were the result of burns rather than cuts.  
The second thought on Steve’s mind was the flash of fiery orange searing through metal and skin, and that was a very vivid and visual memory. Steve looked up at Loki’s face with a frown. Actually he felt a bit nauseous as he thought about the Berserker Staff and all the stories Professor Randolph had thrown around. Steve didn’t think he believed in magic, but Schmidt’s obsessions were certainly not something he could describe as anything but.

“Are you ready?” Natasha asked, and Loki folded his hands neatly behind his back. With the baggy prisoner’s clothes on at last, the gracious nod didn’t seem all that regal anymore. The slicked-back look of Loki’s hair was a lot more disheveled after spending some time in his cell and wrestling with the agents, and his upright posture was less imposing without all the leather.  
“Good, let’s get you to the lab,” Natasha said. If it wasn’t for the strange scarring now visible or the clumsy makeshift gag, Steve would have thought Loki a regular criminal.

He moved. Steve didn’t have time to.

Five sedative guns were aimed at Loki in maybe less than two seconds. The man froze mid-movement, hands halfway up, and looked at Natasha with a puzzled frown. Loki’s eyes seemed to be on her for most of the time, and actually Steve thought it must have been the best choice SHIELD could have made in handling him. Steve knew that Natasha could work out most difficult situations with great success. Loki was apparently no exception.  
Natasha shook her head with a civil smile. Steve didn’t catch what she meant but it clearly wasn’t what Loki had hoped, was it. The guy dropped his hands with a grunt and…  
_Oh_ , it was about the gag. Steve looked at Natasha with a little frown, but she showed no emotion. Loki closed his eyes for a moment, and the deep breath he took seemed to be the only thing keeping him in control. That and the weapons trained at him.

“Thank you for your cooperation. Captain Rogers will help you with the handcuffs. They’re going behind your back this time,” Natasha said, and pointed for one of the agents to bring the handcuffs to him. Loki was staring at Steve closely when he approached, and the time Steve had to spend bending Loki’s arms behind his back seemed like a last spiteful shot at disobedience.

  


/ / / / 

  


_“We’re going to need a bit of your blood. Also, we have new cell for you.”_

It should have gone without saying that a conversation starter like that wasn’t going to get a ‘yeah, sure’ for an answer. Luckily that was exactly what they had hoped. It was more secure this way, without any potential liabilities in trusting a violent man to obey them on his own free will. Thor was drugged senseless before they even dragged him out of his cell on the helicarrier. 

It was just to get him cooperative enough not to crush any agents while they walked him into a quinjet and from there to the current base for the Black Energy Project. Having him attack people would have been messy and unnecessarily complicated.  
It wasn’t pretty, he stumbled and crashed into people regardless, but those were the cons of keeping him mobile enough so the logistic problems of dragging him around wouldn’t have to be repeated. Pros were that when his handcuffs were removed he was easy to goad and prod into changing to the prisoner’s clothes. And that he talked a lot. Actually a lot more than he should have, being so high.

_“Where have you taken my brother...? What did you… do to him? What did you do to Loki?”_  
_“Your brother was nice enough to agree to our terms.”_  
_“I can’t believe you… he is not a very 'nice' person, you see. Or… assuredly he can be, be very nice, but you’re not…”_  
_“Well, you sure seem to like him. Let’s get going, we’re gonna sit you in the lab next.”_

Not that a lot of what Thor said was making much sense, though, nor was it very useful in any way. His words drawled and his thoughts wandered, he laughed a lot, and mumbled something Clint couldn’t hear at all even though he was wearing his hearing aid on his left ear.  
When the lab team took the blood samples from him Thor picked up the volume again, and started to speak in another language. Clint assumed that it was Swedish, seeing as that’s where they picked him up.  
Sure, there were all sorts of 084-matters of unsure origins, but a human-like race of aliens was way above his pay rate. Swedish madmen he could still deal with. Clint was overjoyed to see that at least his blood was red and not, like, green. Or purple or something. There was at least maybe a 60% chance of the attackers being human now. It was great. Thor flexed his hands and his muscled arms twitched through the rest of the test, he was clearly growing annoyed, _and Clint didn’t even know what that one muscle was_. He sure didn’t even have that, and his arms were in pretty good shape, thank you very much.

After Thor started to show signs of crashing down from his confused high, he was led to the cell and thrown inside rather unceremoniously. Two bare metal beds with thin mattresses were bolted to the floor on either side of the cramped space, and he was left sitting on one to sort out his head.  
Clint had left for the labs again, then, and was faced with the other brother. He looked way less pleased and way more gagged than his bigger friend. 

Taking the samples from Loki had gone somewhat smooth - just like Natasha had said, this guy was perhaps less wise but a lot cleverer than Thor. Still, talking him down from the frenzy that he had been working himself up to during it all was a lot more difficult.  
Loki seemed to take rather personal offense at being strapped down to a chair and treated as a test subject. He was glaring at Clint and Steve when they stood in front of him - Clint with a rifle for show and a smaller gun for use, Cap with his crazy muscles.  
Despite all the glares, Loki kept giving in to their commands just enough so that they couldn’t give him a dose of… well, whatever it was that the labs had cooked up. At least not with a good enough reason to keep the present medical staff comfortable. And somehow the prisoner himself was still acting more on edge than anyone else.  
The man was breathing so shallow by the time the lab team dug out the needles that they had to take a break to keep him from hyperventilating and passing out. His pulse was high, his body temperature still on the low side. Even the soft disinfectant pads that were used to clean the skin on Loki’s arm had his muscles twitching and eyes darting between every person in the room.

The look on Loki’s face was actually making Clin uncomfortable, when some time after the tests were taken an agent stopped by, carrying with him _an actual steel muzzle_. Why they had something like that in stock Clint couldn’t say, and he didn’t really want to know either. Then again, if something could be made, SHIELD was pretty sure to also have it - or at least one copy - on hand at all times.  
“Let’s not start fucking around now,” Clint grumbled through gritted teeth when it turned out that Loki _really_ opposed the idea of exchanging his cloth gag into a steel one. The man twisted his head around in all directions to keep them from opening the ties, and after the gag finally came off he resorted to shouting, biting and spitting. Steve had to actually hold Loki's head and neck against his body with force to keep him from dodging it all, and in the end all three of them - Clint, Cap and the agent - were needed to shove the muzzle on.

After the ordeal they were left with a man too heavy for Clint to drag around by himself and too upset to move. So they waited and looked at Loki, sitting strapped on a chair, his eyes so unfocused and his arms and legs shaking in their binds so violently that he was more likely to break the restraints than to manage walking just yet.  
Cap and the leading medic had to crouch down to talk Loki down from what seemed like an honest-to-God panic attack. Somehow it surprised Clint. The guy seemed to have been pretty much in control the last few days. Then again, yeah, being shoved around and muzzled by multiple people was not a nice experience. Which was exactly why it was done that way.  
In the end they managed to hoist the guy up, handcuff him, and drag him down the hall. At some point during that walk Loki seemed to regain his stiff posture and sense of self back, because the guy huffed out an actual laugh through his nose.

Loki was shoved inside the cell some time after Thor. When the two captives finally approached each other, all Clint could think about were two prowling hyenas. Loki’s face showed no clear emotion above the muzzle, other than a weird, shut-off mix of frustration and relief with the last scraps of his previous anxiety.  
But damn him to the deepest pits of hell, if Clint didn’t get to see an actual deep worry etched to the blonde brother’s face. Thor looked so confused.

  


/ / / / 

  


Seventy years. It was little more than the age difference between him and Loki, and they were not born far apart. He was born when the Ice War began, Loki during the bloodshed. And in as short amount of time as that stretch the mortals had managed to stick their noses into the business of higher realms not once but twice. If it had been anything to aim for, Thor could have called it an achievement.

He had meant what he had said to Loki. There was no lord or ruler on Midgard they could reach to confront and to demand the stone back. No longer were there priests of old shrines for whom to whisper things of an age gone by.  
Their names meant hardly a thing on this wretched realm that was slipping so far down into the mud of space that it was barely even visible from the surface. A rotten fruit of Yggdrasill. Soon to turn into Svartalfheim and Niffleheim’s kin, no doubt.  
Their only choice had been to provoke conflict and then wrestle their way through it to gain the Gem. A plan that had seemed thoroughly waterproof mere two days ago. Now it seemed just as fruitless as negotiation.

When he first saw his brother stumble into the room, he let out a massive sigh of relief. Realising that he was muzzled, his magic blocked and his posture straining to stay straight, however, had Thor tensing up again. The hard, distant look in Loki’s eyes spoke of a very clear discomfort.  
He did not wish for a fight.  
“Loki?” Thor asked slowly, pushing himself up from the pathetic excuse of a bed he had been left to sit on. His brother closed his eyes for a moment and just breathed slowly.

“Are you…?” _all right_ , Thor nearly asked, but could easily see that the mortals had been no less vicious in their assault with Loki than they had been with him. Loki opened his eyes again and Thor could see him swallowing. It was odd to see Loki without his stiff, high coat collars.  
“How did they do it?” Thor asked instead and tried to relax his shoulders. Loki’s mouth was forced shut with unpolished steel that covered his whole jaw and mouth. There was no way for a breath of spell to escape him. Had Thor not known it false, he would have suspected Midgardian men of working with dampening witchcraft before as well. They hadn’t known to expect anything like this, and now the Midgardians knew how to tame his brother. It worried Thor greatly.  
Loki looked at him, his gaze gaining slightly more focus. He let out a short scoffing breath through his nose, tilting his head. _These things happen._  
Thor nodded slowly and, _by the ever-growing Yggdrasill_ , did he hope that he would have had his hands free to embrace his brother.  
“You aren’t to blame. Come here,” he whispered and tried to smile. Loki nodded, shut his eyes and nodded again.

Had Thor had his hands free he would have seized his brother by the arm and pulled him into a tight hug. The best they could do with both of them handcuffed was to… well, bump their right shoulders together. It was good to see Loki again, in his true person and not just as a shade, and good to feel him close. Thor leaned in to press a familiar kiss against Loki’s cheekbone, where it wasn’t covered with the steel of the ugly muzzle. He felt Loki’s nose against his own bearded cheek.  
“They will remove that thing soon. They want us to speak. We can bargain,” he whispered in a low voice as quietly as he could, switching cheeks and adding, “And rip these chains off to summon the weapons if the need should arise.”  
Loki looked at him with a bland expression, but kept nodding softly. Had the gesture been any sharper, Thor would have worried for Loki. Luckily, he was most likely not so shaken but rather keeping his emotions at bay for the sake of secrecy.

“We will bring victory to Father and Mother. Do you agree on this?” Thor asked with a reassuring smile, and Loki nodded with a bit more spirit in his eyes. Thor looked over his shoulder to the hallway outside their cell, where a few men were stationed as guards.  
The situation had better turn to their advantage, lest he and Loki would make the mortals pay for their insolence.  
“We will get you the staff one way or another. And if that is what it takes, you will have my blessing to use it as you wish. I will have Mjölnir.”

  


/ / / / 

  


Natasha had never liked not knowing things. Of course she had learned to live with it, and it was never really a personal choice inside a multifaceted agency like SHIELD, the Soviet secret services or any other similar structure. She coped well in difficult environments. It still didn’t have mean she had to like it. _Ёлки-палки._ She really wanted to know what was going on.

“Director Fury, do we know anything about the staff or the hammer yet?” she asked calmly, with a light smile, as she stepped through the door of the director’s temporary office. The look he gave her was flat and unamused, but she knew that he trusted her enough to at least answer that simple a question.  
“Agent Romanoff,” he nodded and gestured for her to come in. Natasha obliged happily and stepped closer to lean against his desk as he scrolled through Coulson and Hill’s report on a touch screen.  
“We know some things, but not enough,” Fury said and rolled his eye, “Coulson has a small tech team still situated in Stockholm. They’re trying to figure out how we are to get that piece of trouble up from the ground and away from the street.”

“So it’s still there?” Natasha asked with a mild frown, “The hammer?”  
“Turns out it can’t be lifted and it’s frying up all electric equipment that’s brought too close. No one knows why, and this far the best guesses are actually this… Professor Randolph’s fairy tales and Stark’s aliens,” Fury huffed. He looked up to give her a glance, and she replied with a shrug.  
“If that’s the way things are…” she said.  
“Seems like every now and then myths actually become history and not the other way round.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay I promise things are going to speed up a little after this one, now that we've officially brought the prisoners in, yay!
> 
> I'm sort of turning around a few different ideas for the turn the plot is going to take, so please, let me know what you think this far, it would be super helpful. Thank you for amazing comments on the last chapter, you guys made my day!
> 
> And the little Cyrillic swear Natasha uses here should probably be written as "yolkey-palkey" for English-speakers. It's a really soft and casual Winnie the Pooh-type 'oh bother' curse.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve is uncomfortable, SHIELD is uncomfortable, Thor is uncomfortable and Loki, perhaps more than the rest, is uncomfortable as well.

The room was brightly lit to keep away the uncomfortable flare of computer screens. Steve had insisted on it, and Natasha hadn’t argued.  
After a year or so Steve still wasn’t that used to looking at a screen for long periods of time. He was getting the hang of using computers with admirable ease, though, and a little bit of sass whenever someone offered unwanted advice. Natasha liked that about him - he had a mind of his own.

They sat in silence on babysitter duty, Steve doodling on a bunch of sticky notes in his ridiculous grandpa plaid and blue jeans. Natasha sipped her coffee in the first SHIELD issue sweatshirt that she had found and her most comfortable pants.  
She felt the pressuring weather darkening her mood even underground. It had always been like that, she felt a little down vefore rainy weather. The forecast had said sun, for the entire week, but apparently the clouds had decided to do something else entirely. A storm was brewing according to everyone working on the upper floors.  
Should have figured that one out. God of Thunder and all.

“Do you think this is humane?” Steve asked and cut her musings of, his brows knitting together. Natasha put on an expression of surprise.  
“This?” she asked and pointed her cup at the video feed of Loki and Thor's cell. Steve nodded.  
“Borderline. But the lab just confirmed that whatever they are, they’re not human anyway.”  
“Right,” Steve said and lowered his voice, “So let’s just treat them like animals,” he scoffed and leaned his back against his chair.  
That time Natasha actually was a little surprised. Steve was obviously a little worried, but she couldn’t say for sure who or what it was for. For their mission? For his own moral code?

Thor was standing at the door of the cell, feet planted firmly on the ground, glaring at the guards and the cameras silently. His hands were flexing where they were bound behind his back. Loki was standing some three feet away, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed. He didn’t seem any less tall and sleazy or alert observant than he had before, but maybe a little tired. And Natasha was very happy to see that. Tired prisoners were good prisoners, because tired usually meant unconvinced and willing to cooperate.  
The Asgardians, if that was what they were, didn’t seem to be in any obvious discomfort, at least not more than any SHIELD’s prisoners usually were. They were on edge and took turns keeping watch, yes, but so did everyone else inside the base. 

It hadn’t seemed like Steve felt bad when they were still watching Loki wrestle all the agents by himself. The change of attitude wasn’t really worrying - Steve had a heart that was too big for anyone to carry around, even though Natasha wasn’t probably the one to judge on that - but it was a little _odd_.  
“What’s bothering you?” Natasha asked slowly, turning her chair to put her feet against the legs of Steve’s chair and look at him properly. She was rarely so blunt, but Steve was also rarely one to start opening up randomly. Sometimes drastic measures were needed. Steve just sighed and looked around with a shake of his head, but his eyes were still sharp and distant.  
“I don’t know. Tony’s right, something isn’t like it’s supposed to be,” he grumbled and crossed his arms.

“Everything’s never the way it should be,” Natasha said and tried to smile a little. Steve nodded and looked at her with something that could have been a laugh if he tried.  
“Yeah, like we getting two ancient deities locked up in our basement. Or whatever they are. The other one is wrestling with a ...panic attack, and the other one keeps glaring a hole through the camera,” he shrugged and looked at the surveillance feed again. Natasha shrugged.  
“Better than having them run around the streets of Stockholm. They could have burned it up and made a comeback tour through all the Scandinavian countries. Think about that,” she reminded him. 

Even though now that she looked again, Loki’s arms and legs were as tense as steel rods and Thor kept looking at him whenever he tore his eyes off the guards or the cameras.  
“Did you say panic attack?” Natasha asked. That should be filed away for later.  
“Clint didn’t?” Steve asked and his brow furrowed, and Natasha shook her head.  
“Well, I can’t say for sure. Maybe it was just a real extreme way of reacting to stress, but he completely zoned out in the lab,” Steve told her slowly but evenly, looking off into the distance. Natasha looked back at the screens. Then again, more than she worried for Loki’s mental state she was worried about Thor busting the handcuffs, with how his arms were constantly turning a little and straining against them.  
“He just… freaked out real bad and then shut off. The medical staff thought he was going to pass out. Especially after the… muzzle,” Steve went on.  
“Yeah, well, that’s its whole point, isn’t it? To be enough of a threat to keep him safe to be around,” Natasha said slowly without even expecting an answer. She looked at Steve, who just let out a muffled ‘mhm’, and fell silent again. Natasha tried to sit back in her own chair more comfortably, but it was a very uncomfortable chair.  
“Do you think it might be an aftereffect of the spear? You said he was behaving odd when you first interrogated him,” Steve asked.  
“Maybe,” Natasha said. “Fury told me that he thinks we really have aliens instead of enhanced people,” she told Steve with a softer voice, but didn’t turn her gaze from the screen to look up at him.  
“Yeah, I think I knew that already when I suggested the tests,” Steve muttered back and shrugged, “but I figured it’d be better to play safe.”  
“Usually it is,” Natasha nodded. Steve fell silent and stared at the monitor for a while, turning the pencil in his hands with an odd twist to his mouth.  
"At least they're not nazis," Steve mumbled and shrugged.

Oh no, no. Was Steve really feeling that bad about this all?  
Natasha let out a soft sigh. He’d better not be blaming himself for anything. 

“...How is that guy supposed to eat anything? Aren’t they supposed to get their meal in an hour,” Steve wondered out loud after a while, but the questioning tone died out when he reached the end. He was definitely taking the discomfort of their prisoners as a personal problem, and did a great job in ruining his own morale in the process.  
Still, Natasha couldn’t help but twist her own mouth in a little agreement to his huff. The answer was simple enough - no, Loki wasn’t supposed to eat. Eventually, of course, but not tonight.  
“Maybe he can... absorb the energy straight off the plate just by looking at it,” Natasha suggested and looked at Steve with a little smile. Steve looked at her with a frown but she saw that he was really holding back a laugh of his own at the absurdity of it.  
“You know what, I wouldn’t actually be surprised if he could,” he said with a bit lighter humor, before going back to his drawings. 

Sketchy hands, wide and bony - he was probably looking at his own left hand for reference by the way he turned it around and clenched it, even though what he drew was a very exaggerated version of his own bone structure - and a pattern of thin bands covering them.  
Alright. Natasha was certain of his guilt by then. Really misplaced one at that.

There was the sound of footsteps and a knock on the door.  
“Guys, Tony’s been talking with Coulson and Hill about getting the new scientists to question those two,” Clint spoke up, pushing his head well past the door before the rest of him entered the room. Natasha looked up at him in surprise, then back at the screens.  
“Those two? I thought it was going to be just the professor,” she asked with a frown. Clint rolled his eyes and shrugged.  
“Yeah, so did I. Apparently Fury wants you two in there with Hill to keep the situation in check.”  
“When?” Steve asked and put his drawing aside.  
“At twelve, in one and a half hour,” Clint said. Natasha nodded her thanks, Steve dropped his pencil on the table and rubbed his forehead.  
“What’s wrong with the people who make these schedules,” he sighed.

 

/ / / /

 

_Agent Hill to all agents on level E. Prepare for the transportation of suspects for scientific inquiry and interrogation. Room E27, we need guards on all doors by 11:15. Over._

_Agent Kent to Agent Hill, Roger that. We’re getting stationed and are clear for moving in the Swedish Empire. E27 is being secured. Over._

 

/ / / /

 

“This is unacceptable. I demand to speak to your leader to negotiate,” Thor stated slowly and clearly, with not an insignificant amount of authority in his voice. The mortal woman stared at him like Thor had just told her that he was a spinster by trade. “I am Agent Hill, and tonight I am the leader,” she answered curtly, her tone sharp. “This is an interrogation. We don’t negotiate with criminals,” she said. “Criminals,” Thor repeated the word. He was having a hard time coming to terms with the insolence of this realm, and he had to fight for his voice to stay even. “How dare you insult us like that?” he asked, with honest surprise, “You do not interrogate a prince of a higher power, either.” “This far you have provided no valid identification of any known land for yourself or your brother,” the plainly unimpressed lady Hill said. Thor was equally unamused. “We’d finally like to get some answers from you, now that he can’t cause more harm,” she stated calmly, looking at Thor with a very flat look. Thor didn't have to look at Loki to see the condescending glare he was undoubtedly giving the woman. He could hardly believe his own ears. 

Truly, Thor hadn’t believed it when they left for Midgard, but it was clear to him now that mortals really were selfish and dull enough that they had finally lost all understanding of other realms. They refused to understand. And even so they were openly challenging all bordering powers with their games around the Tesseract.  
He looked at the dark-haired woman with a furrowed brow.  
“There is not a patch of land on Midgard that, when alone claims to be a state, would reach the level of the other Nine. You must know this,” Thor said and stared the woman down as best he could in the ugly rags he wore. It was like talking to an ignorant farmer’s daughter.  
“No, we don’t,” lady Hill said with a disbelieving shake of her head, “Which is why we need you to tell us where you’re really from and what is the reason for your attack.”

“Come along, sir, sit down. Loki is already obeying the orders nicely enough,” the woman commanded him, and Thor certainly didn’t like it.  
“You shall not have the answers you seek,” Thor growled with a frown of displeasure of his own. Lady Hill stared up at him, and Thor looked over his shoulder to where Loki was looking at him. He was sitting in a crude metal chair, held gently down in the hold of two burly Midgardians. He seemed almost pleased.  
“My brother’s silence means my silence as well,” Thor promised Hill, and only then did he follow her instructions.

_Thor would be King._

That was a constant he had always known, even when Loki had showed more skill in studies of common welfare and politics, in their youth. And more skill in reading people’s intentions, as well. It had never really _mattered_ , other than made Thor jealous of the praise Loki got from Mother.  
Thor was the first-born, and he was the son of Odin and Frigga by birth, not only by oaths. He was a part of the foundation stock, Loki was a fresh drop of foreign blood. They hadn't started the race with an equal handicap weight to begin with, and there had been no addition in the recent times either.  
Where Thor’s life was like a flying pacer, snorting loudly and speeding over a flat turf with his head held high, Loki’s was a hunting horse, scaling hills and thickets and hedges one after another, returning home with scrapes in his knees and mud in his eyes.  
Then again, a pacer was usually an awful jumper, in case it ever happened to face a wall.

Thor would be king all the same. Perhaps he would become a Prince Regent at first, should Father choose to keep his title for as long as there was a breath of life in him, but the day of Thor’s crowning would arrive. Sooner or later. The preparations were already slowly brewing up, even with this inconvenience.  
Loki would of course get some land and a great hall of his own to rule in the Highlands, in the south of Asgard, should he not wish to stay in the palace after he married. Or, if Odin was feeling paranoid, Loki’s new domain would most likely be in Vanaheim.  
Perhaps Loki would become the Jarl of Noatun, after High Prince Njörd gave up his claim over the land of his forefathers. It would reinforce the rule of Borr’s house over the home of the Vanir.

And still there they were, princes of Asgard, moved from a cheap room to another by Midgardian men. All for the Stone.

 

/ / / /

 

He was left with two options - grinding his teeth, or grinding them harder.

The pressure of the hard steel was heavy and not only slightly claustrophobic, pressing tightly against Loki’s jaw, cheeks and the back of his neck. The metal wasn’t feeling so cold anymore, be it from warming up slightly against his racing pulse or because his own skin was being rendered numb by the pressure. A lucky aspect of his situation. Still, the muzzle wasn’t a very easy thing to ignore regardless of one less discomfort. _He wanted to be off with it._

“Good night, a pleasure to meet you two again. It’s nice to see you're getting comfortable,” the sharp-eyed redhead said as she entered, the big blonde man following her. Both were dressed in the same tight combat gear he had last seen them in.  
The same combat gear Loki had fought the man in. Twice, now. Lost twice, no matter how voluntary the first lose may have been.

They were seated next to each other, and both brothers sat in silence, chained to simple and sturdy metal chairs that were bolted to the floor. Loki looked at the mortals down his nose, hands resting on his armrests in as relaxed way as he could manage, while Thor openly glared at them from under his brow and squeezed his fists tightly.  
Loki spared a glance towards his brother to his right - _it was wrong_ , he was supposed to stay on Thor’s right when it was just the two of them - and Thor’s arms were straining against the somewhat simpler handcuffs than before.  
They were rewarded with a hopeful creaking sound every now and then, and the mortals looked at each other every time it happened. At that moment Loki dearly hoped that Thor would do something recklessly stupid. And now, when for the first time in decades he wanted to tell the oaf so, he was unable to. 

Alas, Thor stayed put. The cursed idiot.

“Loki we’ve already met, but nice to finally meet you as well… Thor?" the captain asked. Thor rolled his eyes and Loki resisted the urge to repeat after. "I’m Captain Rogers and this is Agent Romanoff. We’re here to see to your interrogation under the instructions of Agent Hill,” the man said, looking at Thor with a very blank sternness in his expression. What he didn’t say aloud was most likely _‘I am the strongest warrior around, and summoned here to try and subdue you if problems arise’_ even if his chances at succeeding in such were low.

Then again, there was much that had defied Loki's expectations.  
Midgardians were not supposed to know a thing about magic, for example. They did not possess inborn capability for seithr like Asgardian people did, and they surely knew nothing about fabricated spells. There were no natural elementals here.  
Loki knew that. It was a simple fact. He had known that for a long time. And he also knew that he was an especially hard one to catch, harder to bind. He had studied witchcraft for the whole length of his life and had networks through Alfheim and Vanaheim from blood witches and rune men to scribes and priests. He could recite the little amount of magical practises on Midgard in his sleep.  
He did _not know_ how it was that they had known to stop his tongue. He did not know that, as true as the soil was black and the sky was blue.  
Could they have worked it all out so easily, from the struggle he had had with those five guards?

They were the Princes of Asgard, and keeping them chained like dogs was _an outrage_ among insults. Every single day of their lives Thor and Loki had worked and trained and studied and achieved to fulfill the expectations of the noble families.  
Granted, Thor met those expectations more often than Loki, when charming looks and winning wrestling matches were in question. But Loki had proved time after time that his skills lay best in entertainment and politics, and saving ruined plans. 

Where Thor had blinding passion and goodwill, Loki knew that he had cunning and ruthlessness hos brother often lacked. Where Loki planned and stalled ( _faltered and hesitated_ ), Thor stood like a mountain and made up his mind. They were opposites, and many said that had the brethren been born as one son instead of two, he would have made the best king Asgard could expect.  
Loki could only agree. He still didn’t _like_ it one bit.

Someone said something. It was hard to focus on a thought.  
_They needed to get the muzzle off._ Loki glanced at Thor as discreetly as he could. The contraption around his jaw was heavy and he was starting to feel light-headed again, like he had in the room with the bright lights and the needles and the hands and-

“Is either of you going to talk, or do we have to get you something to loosen you up a little?” Agent Romanoff asked, her lips quirking a little at the corners, deliberately. Loki wanted to say that yes, of course he would talk, if only to regain the use of his seithr, (yes, of course he would talk, was this not _enough_ already, there was no need for anything else) but the woman only looked at Thor. Loki knew that his brother wouldn’t budge until he had what they wanted - which could have been good, but also wasn't.  
The captain stared at the wall behind them, stiff as a fence pole.  
Loki moved a little, chained wrists making yanking, rattling sounds, and let out a long huff of air through his nose. The captain crossed his arms, eyes squinting momentarily towards him.  
So, his own captor and opponent was unsettled by Loki. The next huff of air was almost a laugh.

“What’s so funny?” the redhead asked immediately. Loki could only open his palms and shrug instead of saying anything. Either she truly wasn’t intimidated, or then she hid it remarkably well.  
“If you’re good, we might give you a pen. Providing that you don’t go stabbing anyone with it,” Agent Romanoff smiled. She nodded softly like a real dignitary. She must have been a professional in interrogation situations like the one they were in.  
There was a grim sort of joy Loki found in her cool stare. Something in her expression was different from the rest. Layered like his own.  
Where she was concerned, an agent must have been the same as a spy. A scout or an assassin. She was a good actor, and if able, Loki would have granted her a smile for it. A mirroring nod had to suffice, bound as he was.

“Doctor Foster will be here in a few minutes. You are supposed to help the science team with their questions. So just, try to speak with Doctor Foster. If you do, then maybe, after all this is over, we can help you sort your own mess out,” the captain spoke up all of a sudden. Thor seemed ready to lunge at him, and his metal cuffs creaked again. Didn’t break, a shame.  
“We’ll stay here with Agent Romanoff to keep an eye on things."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay, another update (finally!)  
> University application processes are eating my time, but I'll try to update soon - with some more Jane.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Questions over questions, some of them old, some of them new. Doctor Foster and Professor Randolph meet each other and the Swedish Empire.

The air inside the room was so dry that after she sat down Jane was forced to stop thinking in favor of blinking. It didn't seem to bother anyone else at all, but that might be because she had just stepped into a room filled with superheroes and potential aliens. A typical Monday morning in the wee hours of the night.   
The room was brightly lit with a clinical white color, but Jane was also slowly getting familiar with the smell of sweat and the clunks and hums of an underperforming air conditioning system. It made the lower levels of the SHIELD base feel less like a world-class science building and more like a badly camouflaged evil dungeon. Captain America and a very unamused-looking red haired spy were standing on the other side of the room.

“So,” Jane started and tried to smile a little. Both of the men looked at her with nearly identical expressions of disgust. She probably shouldn’t have smiled, but even under all the absurdity of the situation, she was excited. And maybe bordering on hysteric too.  
Jane Foster was no longer a crazy lazy doing her own wild fringe sciences. Now she had two potential living pieces of evidence. The energy readings from that Friday night in Stockholm matched all the calculations she had based on hypotheses of an Einstein-Rosen bridge. It must have been a portal. A focal point where two coordinates of time and space came together.   
Jane wasn’t saying that they had aliens, but she wasn’t saying that they didn’t. Not now when she was getting a chance to ask about it from the two people who could have actually come through the bridge.  
Was she turning into a conspiracy theorist? Maybe. 

“Hi, I’m Doctor Foster,” she said after a while of sitting in silence, and cringed. This was no time to start fussing, no matter how nervous she was, but she could really feel her heart pounding even though she tried to focus.  
“I said that already. And you’re Loki and Thor," Jane tried again, and it sounded just as dumb.   
"Why am I repeating myself?” she hissed in panic under her breath, and tried to recollect herself. The muzzled one rolled his eyes so hard Jane thought he’d strain something. Loki, they had said.   
It was silent for a moment before Jane opened his notebook and started to think of something to say.

“Why should a healer be interested in matters concerning stars?” the blonde man suddenly asked with a rumbling voice, and what surprised Jane the most was that it was in a perfect, neat English. No stumbling nor any real accent, apart from a very old-timey vibe. It took her a while to register what he actually said, but when she did, Jane wasn’t exactly amused.   
A healer.  
“Oh, yeah no,” Jane said and turned her eyes to the table to bite the inside of her cheek unnoticed. Typical. Men couldn’t stand women who worked their asses off for high academic positions, it turned out, regardless of where they were from.  
“I’m not that kind of a doctor. A healer. I’m an astrophysicist. A scientist. It’s my work to study everything that,” she said and glanced at the muzzled man who moved a little in his chair, “concerns the stars.”   
Thor blinked slowly in a way that was maybe supposed to be a nod of understanding, but said nothing. It was a very silent few moments before Jane understood that he wasn’t going to say anything. That was probably the point of the interrogation, since the backup seemed to be staring at Thor more intently than before.  
“I’d like to ask you a few questions about your… home? Asgard?” Jane checked. Thor looked at Loki, and apparently a lazy turn of his pale wrist was enough to tell Thor something about his opinion on the matter.

A manila envelope had been dropped on Jane’s desk some time during that evening, with the word ‘classified’ stamped on it with red ink. There were listings of casualties from Stockholm, more details of the Tesseract, the situation of some of the involved Avengers - Banner as a researcher only - and a lot of bystander accounts. There was a thin additional file about a spear and something that looked like a hammer.   
Five dead people in one night was horrible. Still, it didn’t look to Jane like the two men - codename “Swedish Empire”, citizenship not confirmed, enhanced individuals - had went out of their way to destroy anything. They could have done a lot worse if they had really tried, of that she was sure, but they clearly really really wanted the Tesseract.

“Where did you come from?” Jane asked, because really, that was what she most wanted to know. “Where is Asgard?”  
“If you are a rotten fruit at the root of the tree, we are an ever-glowing flower on top of it,” Thor said. Loki’s eyes were satisfied and amused right up until Thor added: “Far from here. But with the Bifröst it is no challenge.”  
“So it’s… you’re from space?” Jane asked. She really hoped that they weren’t crazy, because this was the biggest turn her research was ever going to take. Thor looked at her a little funny, but nodded. Loki’s eyes wandered the corners of the room.

“Why do you study the stars?” Thor asked, and Jane was taken aback by him taking interest in her work.  
“I don’t have to tell you anything about why I do what I do,” she said firmly, “I’m not being interrogated here,” Jane added. Even if it clearly wasn’t what Thor had expected, he didn’t seem angered by her snappy answer. Good. Jane tapped her pen against the notebook lightly before looking up at the odd brothers again.  
“Why are you looking for the Tesseract? Or actually I’m asking, like… how did you know to look for it here?” she asked and hoped that she would get an answer. Loki turned to look straight at her, and Thor nearly laughed. Jane had an eerie feeling that they were somehow communicating without any words.  
“How? It was Asgard who gave it to your ancestors in the first place. Do you think we’d lose track of it just because someone else held it for safekeeping,” Thor asked with a disbelieving tone. It turned a bit less amused then, “And you haven’t exactly been subtle in your attempts to use it for a higher form of war.”  
Jane couldn’t really say anything to that. She spared a glance towards the super heroes to the right side of the room, past Loki’s shoulder. The agent made a little twitch with the corners of her eyes that still somehow screamed “no”. Jane tried to close her eyes “yes” but couldn’t say how well she managed. War wasn’t her business, she was only there for science.  
“Okay,” Jane said out loud and looked at Thor and Loki as blankly as she could. It was hard to think of anything better to say. Thor’s brows furrowed a little. Maybe he had expected a different reaction.

“Could you tell me more about the Tesseract? If you really believe it is yours, how do you intend to use it?” Jane asked and saw before she finished that it was the wrong question. Loki scoffed through his nose, dark-rimmed eyes narrowing in a very unfriendly way, and Thor looked at him with a sullen expression.  
“You would like to know that, would you. Tampering with its powers is too slow a research for your race,” Thor growled, but with the way Loki tilted his head Jane felt like it was more a translation of his body language instead of anything Thor himself thought up. Loki’s fingers were moving.  
Did they have a sign language?  
Another spare glance to the agent next to Captain America confirmed Jane’s suspicions - she was also looking at Loki’s hands that had stilled again.

“Why should we answer to you, my ladies?” Thor asked, and when Jane looked up at him again, she realised that he had followed the direction of her eyes to the SHIELD spy easily. Thor’s hands were balled into fists and he sat farther back in his chair, almost as if holding himself back.  
“As far as we see, there is nothing for us to gain from giving you new knowledge,” he proclaimed loudly enough for everyone to know that it was not a problem for Jane to solve, but for SHIELD. Jane didn’t know if he spoke of himself in plural or if he meant the two of them. She didn’t know how Loki would have contributed to the conversation if he could have said something, and she really didn’t know how princes usually did.  
“You get the joy of giving away information on your own volition. You also get to tell your own side of the story,” the red haired agent replied curtly for Jane’s sake and moved to get a look straight towards the two Asgardians. Thor scoffed.  
“And I could say that by giving away the Gem now, you shall enjoy the freedom of choice,” he said. Jane didn’t miss the unsaid threat.  
“If all goes well tonight, we might even reconsider the circumstances of Loki’s containment,” the agent said and smiled coldly. Both men seemed unimpressed by the offer. “If it goes bad, we might also reconsider your situation,” she added.

For the first time since their arrival Loki ripped his stare away from Jane or the ceiling to glare at the agent. Not a muscle in his body seemed to move, only his head turned as his hands stilled, frozen in mid-movement.

It was like the temperature in the room actually dropped a little, even though that was probably not true. Jane still felt goosebumps rise on her arms, and the steel table seemed a bit cooler too. Loki leaned slowly forward in his chair, his hands grabbing the armrests like he was about to just stand up. So what if he was handcuffed to the chair.  
The agent lowered her hand to her hip, to her gun, and Captain America took half a step away from the wall. Jane pressed back in her chair.  
“Loki,” Thor said with a low voice. There was a pause, but whatever that call had meant, it seemed to stay only between the two. It was enough to make Loki turn his focus back to him with an angry look. With a quiet sigh he let go of his armrests and sat back, and the moment of terror passed. Jane looked at the Captain and the agent, but they didn’t say anything.

The lock clicked and Jane nearly jumped in her chair. Loki and Thor both looked up at the door and tilted their heads near simultaneously, with identical confused frowns. It looked very odd, even though Jane couldn’t say she enjoyed random interruptions either.   
Before Jane turned to look at the door, she got a glimpse of Loki taking a deep breath through his nose and sweeping a thumb against the pads of his fingers before flattening his hand against the arm of the chair. Thor blinked once, slowly, and yes, it definitely was a sign language.   
The door opened and a middle-aged man, though clearly somewhat younger than Erik, was shown inside, another chair brought in for him. He nodded to the Captain and the agent with some familiarity, before offering a hand to Jane. His expression was shut off, almost timid, and Jane couldn’t really blame him. He made a point of not looking at Thor and Loki, at all. Jane took the offered hand.

“Elliot Randolph, nice to meet you,” he said pleasantly, smiling a little, and shook Jane’s hand with a firm grip, “You must be Doctor Foster.”  
“Yes. Nice to meet you,” she replied. Thor and Loki were both looking at them with a set of calculating looks. Loki leaned on his elbow like he would have been sitting in a comfy beach stretcher instead of an interrogation chair, and Thor looked intrigued enough to rip his hands from the chains and cross them on the table in front of them. Captain America seemed to catch on and cleared his throat a little.  
“Professor Randolph is here to clear some of the unfamiliar terms and concepts for us. A translator, if you will. You can go on.”

After a Jane shortly briefed Professor Randolph of what they had covered (not a lot), she let out a long breath. Thor and Loki looked at Randolph instead of her, and somehow it was a little annoying. Of course they’d only think a man to be worth their time when she rambled, tense as anyone could be, and asked questions they didn’t want to answer.  
Something clicked into place when she looked at the way both men sat in their chairs. Thor was just a bit too grounded, a bit too close to a friendly stance. Loki was way too haughty for his situation, almost dropped to a slouch.  
“If you two really are princes,” Jane began carefully, narrowing her eyes a little in honest confusion, “Why were you sent on a military mission alone? Isn’t it a little dangerous for important figureheads in general?”  
Loki’s arms twitched, Thor's expression darkened again. 

 

/ / / /

 

Sitting for long periods of time in uncomfortable chairs was really going to be the death of him, one of these days.

“Professor,” the beautiful red-headed Agent Romanoff called after Elliot in the hallway that had already quieted for the night long ago. She walked towards him with purpose in her steps and strong determination in the line of her shoulders, and he really wished that she hadn’t. He already felt drained from the tense interrogation - if that was what it was called when two people tried unsuccessfully to milk information from two who saw no error in their deeds - and would have preferred to retire for the night already.   
It was so different from standing in front of a classroom or having a nice, friendly chat with someone over a dinner and a glass of wine, especially when the two Æsir knew exactly how to withhold the most important bits of information. 

Still, Elliot stopped so that the agent could catch him and smiled as pleasantly as he could. And he could.  
“Yes?” Elliot asked, straightening his shirt and tie a little. The agent looked a bit tired as well, but was still wearing her full combat gear. Admirable.  
“I am here to thank you for today. You seemed to handle them better than most of our actual agents do,” Romanoff nodded with a smile and gestured for them to continue walking when she reached Elliot. There was a hidden meaning behind the bland compliment, but Elliot took it all the same.   
“Well, thank you,” he nodded. “I just tried to look at it from their perspective.”  
“The perspective of a god?” Agent Romanoff asked and smiled, but it was not a smile that joked. It was a smile that tried to act like it joked.  
“Perhaps,” Elliot answered, smiling much in the same way. He lifted his brows a little as the woman opened her mouth again, and cut her off: “I think you must be asking something else from me, Agent Romanoff, in the middle of the night like this. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy a little small talk with you,” he said and eyed her with a look that was a hint on the teasing side. She stared at him for a while before nodding.  
“You’re right,” she admitted, not sheepishly or in an annoyed way, but very businesslike. It was predictable, but Elliot would have appreciated a good night’s sleep before worrying about the Berserker Staff and the two stubborn princes again.  
“We are going to be analyzing tonight’s information for a while,” the lady told him when they took a turn around a corner towards the stairs. Elliot nodded.  
“Do you need my help in that?” he asked.   
“Later, yes,” Romanoff said. “Meanwhile, would you perhaps like to talk to Loki tomorrow?”

Oh.   
To _Loki_?

Elliot paused for a step.  
“Him? Well, I will not lie when I say that… not particularly, no” he admitted at length and in all honesty. Elliot shoved his hands to his pockets. How had he managed to get himself into this mess? Romanoff smiled again, maybe a hint apologetic, maybe not at all. She had probably had a share of her own of Loki’s sharp tongue over the course of the days, though Elliot couldn't really say how long the muzzle had been on.  
“We would love to see if you could get something valuable out of him. We’ll have the interrogation room prepared for you some time tomorrow,” Romanoff said, before turning around to leave. She looked over her shoulder and smiled, when she added: “Good night, Professor.” 

Elliot let out a long sigh. Fuck his life.   
This life and the last one, and the next that would undoubtedly follow soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back! Somehow writing this particular chapter was taking me ages when compared to others, and I don't know, maybe it was the relatively short timeframe in-universe but still an important plot point? 
> 
> Let me know what you thought (and tell me if you spot any mistakes, this was un beta-ed), I love reading your opinions! Next chapter will be up sooner than this one was.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brotherly arguments are sometimes based on old sagas. Tony and Steve can argue based on thos arguments. And a Norse Mythology Professor of the Univeristy of Seville, Elliot Randolph, is in for a weird afternoon.

“Sir, I think we might be onto something,” Natasha said into her comms as a final note for Nick and Phil before calling it a day and leaving for her temporary sleeping compartment. After a short moment of static white noise she heard the director.  
_“Good. Keep fishing, Romanoff.”_  
“I will. Tomorrow,” she said. “Good night Director Fury, Coulson.”  
_“Like anyone has slept since the Swedish Empire took reign,”_ Coulson piped in.  
_”We are gonna have to keep a full briefing tomorrow. You can all tell me what I’ve missed.”_

If she was being completely honest, which she rarely was, Natasha had felt something that was close to worry and fear when they removed the muzzle from Loki. The guy had sat in silence and stared at her the entire time Steve worked it open. Thor had seemed more than ready to jump up when it clicked open.  
Loki had smiled at her, a disgusting sleazy grin, and Natasha had kept her own face blank and mildly uninterested. 

“Thank you,” he had said, “It was rather uncomfortable,” and hadn’t that been anticlimactic. 

Not that freeing his mouth had helped one bit, Loki’s answers were even more vague than Thor’s had been. In the end, after Foster and Randolph had left, Brookes and Clint had led a team to get Loki and Thor back to the cell.  
It had been way too uneventful. Something should have happened. She tossed and turned in her bed before telling herself to sleep now and worry about it later.

In a short-lived, dark and dimly lit corner of her dreams she stumbled across Loki. 

He was sitting lazily on nothing in particular, slouching, almost, looking so bored and innocent that had he been in anyone else’s dream, it wouldn’t have been suspicious at all. But Natasha stopped in her tracks, turning her head and actually noticing Loki instead of going with the flow of the dream. He just was there. In the dark. A warm glow like from an old light bulb lighting his features from nowhere she could see.  
Loki looked up at her. Natasha frowned.

“You have a dygn to start using better tools of negotiation,” Loki said and smiled politely. “Before we refuse to negotiate any longer.”  
“That’s not up to you to decide,” Natasha said and went past him to continue sleeping in peace. She knew that Loki stayed in his corner of nothing for a while, trying to keep looking where she went, but it wasn’t long before she couldn't feel his eyes on her back any longer.

He had been wearing a belted robe of white and gold. The thick green threads of embroidered patterns followed her like snakes, curving around the edges of her short, choppy dreams. The… costume was something Natasha couldn’t remember ever having seen before.  
She woke up abruptly, to nothing but her empty quarters.

/ / / /

“That sure was something,” Steve greeted her before lunchtime, coming to stand next to Natasha near the doors of the underground floors’ cafeteria. She looked at him a little skeptically.

“You sound like you had fun,” she said. Steve shrugged a little, his face a little blank, but if he was really tired from last night it didn’t show on his face. Natasha had looked into a mirror when she brushed her teeth and washed her face, and she was already looking like a mission-shaped steam train had run her over. Must have been nice to avoid that for a few more days, being a super soldier. Fatigue wasn’t something you could train yourself out of.  
“Just glad to get some kind of answers at last. You aren’t?” Steve asked and lifted a brow at her. Natasha made a face.  
“Not when they involve aliens, war and medieval pacts that ‘should still be a common law’,” she scoffed. Steve smiled a little even though the joke was dry.  
“At least we are going to get a resolute decision on whether or not we’re allowed to call them aliens,” he said.

Natasha waved and turned to get inside when she saw Clint approaching from around the corner. SHIELD should have invested in straighter hallways - she was still sometimes getting lost in this base, and the rest weren’t any easier.  
And if she looked a little tired, then Clint looked like crap, so there was that.

“Did you hear?” Clint asked, fiddling with his left hearing aid as the noise level rose inside. They got their own table with their coffees and juices and sad stuffed breads and soups. They should have invested in better hasty cafeteria food too.  
“Hear what?” she asked and stirred her coffee while Steve dug into his crumbling BLT roll, his eyes on Clint as well.  
“About the row they had,” Clint shrugged, “In the cell. They stayed up until morning. The guys on guard duty had to tell them they’d tase or tranquilize them both if they didn’t shut up,” he said. At first it took her a moment to understand who Clint was talking about, but when Natasha realized, she let some of the surprise show.

“Thor and Loki? What were they fighting about?”  
“I don’t know. Disagreeing about the plans they had made prior their attack or something. No wonder, though,” Clint said and took a gulp of his disgustingly green juice, “I’d be pissed too if I was locked up for the… what, fourth day in a row?”  
“Four-ish,” Steve said, “if you don’t think about the time zones then maybe soon roughly the fifth.”  
“Today is probably going to be easy then,” Natasha said. Both men looked at her with confused frowns. She let out a breath that wasn’t quite a sigh, but it wasn’t far from that either.  
“Classified,” she said from behind her cup, hiding a smile.  
“What’s Coulson sending you to do?” Steve asked. “You aren’t going to have to talk to them again?”  
“No, not me,” Natasha answered. She enjoyed her coffee in peace as Clint caught on and groaned.

“Really?” he asked. “They want Professor Mousy to check on those bulldozers?”

/ / / /

L: _So your great plan_ [...] _was to_ [...] _Get caught all along._ [Forced laugh] _And stay caught! Is that it? This is what you wanted?_ [...] (TH: _Loki_ ) _You’re truly a_ [...] _a marvel among men._ [ _You have never-_ ]  
TH: _What is your plan, then?_ [Hm?] [...] _You. Who love scheming?_ (L: _Don’t start-_ ) _You who would tear down the building. The Gem with it. And start over again?_ [...] _On the hills of Södermalm? Play pretend with the mortals._ [ _And you call me a poor strategist-_ ]  
L: _While you’re playing Bosi!_ [...] _Giving away all that you still had control over. For a well for your colt to drink from._  
TH: _Shut your mouth, Loki!_ [...] _Do not!_ [...] _Talk to me._  
[The conversation ended 04:27.]  
[04:33 starts unintelligible whispering. L initiates it. 04:36 another conversation starts. L initiates it again.]

/ / / /

The room was split in half with a clear force field. The tech guys said that it was based on some kind of an electric grid, but all Natasha needed to know was that it would hold a grown bear if needed.  
She couldn’t help but feel an eerie sort of worry when she thought of what Phil had told her before the interrogation. Professor Randolph’s intel - even as shaky as it was - on the Berserker Staff was worrying.

More so when she was looking at Loki, shifting his weight on each leg like a fenced-in animal at the zoo. Natasha really hoped that the force grid would hold, at the very least for Randolph’s sake. Loki waited impatiently.

The alien. The man who frequently zapped himself with a dangerous, lethal stick for the hell of it. The person who, without his strange prowling and his ramrod-straight posture, would have probably passed for any skinny kid arrested for drugs in… Boston or somewhere. Anywhere really. And even though he looked human, he looked at the world in a way that reminded Natasha of fairytales. He was something else, looking at the world of the mortal men in amusement from his side of the story.  
Loki looked like a case Natasha would have never taken, but he was the case Natasha knew she would have been saddled with in any life.

“Are you ready?” she asked when Randolph gave her back the pad that held last night’s and that morning’s transcripts. The professor didn’t try to hide his grimace as he straightened his tie and jacket.  
“I would have preferred to see him in a better mood,” he said, and Natasha smiled professionally.  
“So would we all. We will have men stationed here in case of an emergency,” she said and motioned with her hand for Randolph to step in. They weren’t in a hurry, but in a situation like this they didn’t really have time to spare either.

Loki’s movements stilled as soon as the lock clicked, and his eyes were on Randolph the instant he stepped through the mirror doors to the side of the room.  
“Good afternoon,” Natasha heard Randolph’s voice say through the speakers. Loki said nothing yet, staring at the professor coolly.  
“Coulson,” Natasha said to her own comms, “Randolph is in with Loki. Do you need me up or do I stay here?”  
“Agent Romanoff. If you don’t mind staying there in damage control, it’d be great,” Phil replied curtly. “Stark and Rogers are on their way and you can join us when that mess is over. Even though, knowing Stark? They’re probably gonna get here _tomorrow._ ”  
“If even then. Thank you, Phil,” she answered and rolled her eyes. 

Randolph and Loki both stood in silence until the Professor asked a question in a language Natasha couldn’t name.

/ / / /

Elliot looked around, wary rather than skittish, but saw only the reflection of himself and Loki. Even though he knew that Agent Romanoff was watching, Elliot felt very alone all of a sudden. And he knew without a doubt that he should have stayed in Seville when he had still had the chance.

“How do you fare, your Highness?” Elliot asked a little bit impatiently when a regular ‘good afternoon’ didn’t work.  
Loki looked at him judgingly, standing still with his hands bound behind his back. The short sleeves of his prisoner’s shirt displayed a rather unsettling amount of faintly scarred skin. Elliot knew the swirling runes like the back of his own hand, even if the backs of Loki’s hands must have been in a much worse shape. How much damage was the boy willing to take, just for fun?  
The blank look Loki wore slowly turned into a sharp little smile. His pale eyes were sharp as well, the colour of old lichen, and he stared at Elliot coldly.  
“As well as one can in chains and cells. And you, good Mister…?” Loki drawled in a decidedly unfriendly tone, his reply so delayed that Elliot hardly remembered asking. “Randolph? Is that your name?”

They had met last night, and Loki hadn’t talked during the conversation. There were bruises along his jaw, already yellow and fading, to prove that. Elliot tried not to focus on them. It should have only been expected that his name wouldn’t mean much.  
Even so, Elliot found himself unable to believe in that glimmering possibility. The tone of Loki’s voice was much too direct, scolding even. The people here were misguided in their trust in the methods they used to silence and confuse the boy.  
“It is. Elliot Randolph,” Elliot replied and nodded courteously, but kept the gesture small. Loki stopped on his tracks, closed his eyes for a moment like he was thinking about something, and the walls of the room rippled once.  
“They can’t see or hear any of this now,” Loki said. Elliot forced up a thin smile when the young man looked up again, sounding like he was maybe trying to be gracious or friendly, and then he continued the caged walk he had been doing before Elliot got in. Elliot didn’t want to be there, but sadly he had very little choice in the matter.

“What brings you here?” Loki asked Elliot when he stilled again, and somehow he managed to make the hold of his wrists behind his back look intentional and relaxed. Elliot shrugged a little. Perhaps he imagined the odd force behind Loki’s ‘you’, and the accusatory flavour in between his words.  
“I was sent to ask you about you and your brother’s mission. Quest, as it were,” he told the lean prince. Loki smiled a little, more to himself than to Elliot.  
“And what do you want to know?” Loki asked in a soft voice, his face morphing to an almost curious version of its previous self. Elliot knew now why people said that he was a flame or a gust of wind. It was impossible to get a hold of the emotions the boy was showing. There was too much, and just like that it was all too little to be anything.  
“Is there a time frame for your visit?” Elliot asked. “Are you in a hurry, or does Asgard still feel content to wait?”  
“Asgard does,” Loki agreed, “Her citizens don’t. ‘Tis a sad truth that no magic we can produce will ever quite match the Tesseract,” he added with a nonchalant look. Elliot nodded slowly.  
“You seem well-learned in that field,” he prodded. Loki took half a step away, his interest in Elliot apparently fading already.  
“That must be because I am,” Loki said.  
“You must take it very seriously,” Elliot said slowly, and stuck his hand right into the wasp’s nest. Loki’s eyes were on him again.  
“I would have thought that only old men show the scars of a Berserk Staff. If they live long enough. Perhaps they should have kept the muzzle on, your Highness,” Elliot said. Loki shot up to the force grid so fast and so close that it flashed with a loud snap. Elliot stayed still.

“You! You truly are the one,” Loki said, a chillingly self-assured purr in his voice.  
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Elliot laughed unhappily, and Loki joined in with mocking empathy.  
“Yes you do,” the Asgardian said, and Elliot stilled.  
He was fucked, quite honestly. Fucked beyond salvation.

_“Professor Randolph, Loki, thank you both. This has been enough for today,”_ Agent Romanoff’s voice rang clearly through the speakers, and the lock of the door clicked again just before it slid open.  
Loki smiled to Elliot. It was a compliment, the smile of a polite young gentleman. The edges of the room flickered again when Elliot turned on his heel and left the room.

“That was impressive,” the agent said, her lips pursed with a visible hint of sincerity, for no reason Elliot could see.  
“Excuse me,” he had to clear his throat a little. “What was?” Elliot asked. Agent Romanoff crossed her arms on her chest, clearly pulling back some of the praise.  
“Again, tomorrow. You got more out of him in under an hour than we did in days,” she said and motioned for the door, staring at him with almost as much intensity as Loki just had.  
“I don’t think he really said much,” Elliot had to disagree.  
“He flat out admitted that the Tesseract is a portal and that he and his brother are scouts for the reclaim operation. I’d say that’s something,” Agent Romanoff said, hiding her scoff politely, “And to admit that the muzzle blocks… well, whatever it is that he does, is another win for our team. I’m glad he agreed to talk to you again, even though his motives aren’t clear yet.”

Elliot knew better than to say that they had discussed nothing of the sort.

/ / / /

The halls were lovely quiet when they walked, but somehow Tony Stark still filled them with sound.

“Cap, you’ve got to admit that there’s something really off about this,” Tony said, turning around to face Steve and kept walking backwards. Steve stuck his hands to the pockets of his leather jacket and frowned.  
“That’s what I’ve been saying for days,” Steve huffed, but gave up soon. It probably wasn’t that Tony didn’t listen to him, just that the guy only listened to himself. “It feels like the argument they had last night was really the first thing that they didn’t plan to happen,” Steve added. Tony grimaced a little, and jabbed a finger at Steve’s chest.

“And what was that about? Another liability,” Tony said. They passed an agent and Steve kept his mouth shut until the woman was no longer visible.  
“What liability?” Steve asked with a low tone, not entirely following the hazy track of thought. “Loki’s… powers?” he asked. Tony looked like he didn’t even want to think about that. About anything that even Doctor Banner had dubbed magic - admittedly with a strange little shrug that the guy had only made with his eyebrows.

“No, my proper little Irish friend,” Tony said, clearly trying to press Steve’s buttons, and fell back to step beside him. Steve didn’t rise up to the bait if only for the possibility of actually getting to hear what Tony was rambling about. The guy clapped a hand on Steve’s shoulder even if it meant that he had to reach up a little.  
“The woman,” Tony said.  
“The woman?” Steve blurted out before he saw Tony’s expression. “You mean Doctor Foster?”  
“Yeah, Thor was obviously happy to talk to her since she’s the only one of us that understands his space jargon. And Loki didn’t like that.”  
“You’re saying that they were arguing about her?” Steve asked. He hadn’t heard the audio yet, but he’d read the transcript, and he hadn’t seen Doctor Foster’s name anywhere.

“Hey, I know how to Google even if you don’t. If the stories go both ways, we share theirs and they share ours,” Tony snorted flippantly, and Steve was eerily reminded of Howard’s antics.  
“They share ours?”  
“Well like, not ours, but the vikings have a crazy story about a man, who meets trolls and giants, and on his way he takes a break at every farm house he comes across just to bang the daughter of the house with some really weird euphemisms, and his name is Bosi,” the ghost that was Tony explained rapidly. “Case in point, Loki was quoting that story to Thor when they argued. Calling him Bosi,” Tony said, sounding very satisfied in his own logic. Steve nodded slowly. It wasn’t that much of a stretch, probably, but he would have called it a comical overreaction on Loki’s side.  
“Right. So Loki might fear that Thor’s gonna blow their mission for a crush.”  
“Yeah. And we could use that fear,” Tony nodded. 

Steve stopped and looked at the man for a moment. He laid a hand on Tony’s shoulder to turn him around.  
“We’re not going to use a civilian as a bait,” Steve said firmly. Tony’s smile dropped and the happy arrogance turned to something else. Something offended.  
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t put words in my mouth. I wasn’t talking about her,” Tony snapped and glared at Steve, shoving the hand away. “But divide and conquer is something that usually works.”

Steve watched in silence as Tony turned away and picked up his pace, digging his phone up from his pocket.  
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have,” Steve called after him and swallowed his pride, “I guess I’m a little on edge from all this.”  
“Yeah whatever,” Tony scoffed. “Everyone is.”  
“So… were you thinking about this as an Avengers plan or…?” Steve asked, following Tony to an elevator that would take them to the upper conference and office levels. “A secret plan?”  
“Definitely a secret plan. Fury would just blow it up and definitely use Foster as a bait,” Tony said as he punched the button.  
“Why are you telling me?” Steve asked.  
“Because you were a dick to me just a minute ago and feel ridiculously bad about it, and so won’t tell anyone about this talk we had. Also, because I know you don’t want this mess to involve any civilian casualties,” Tony said and lifted his eyebrows smugly. Steve almost managed not to roll his eyes when he sighed and shook his head. Almost.  
“Well, I can’t say you’re wrong.”

“Took you long enough,” Coulson greeted them when they were out of the elevator. “We need to make sense of Loki’s ramblings and Thor’s demands. Also, Foster’s team has new results on the Tesseract.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woooah sorry about the pause - have a longer-ish chapter as a treat for your wait. Thanks for all the comments you left on the last chapter, they've made me so happy and excited while I've been writing!


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> SHIELD tries to finally get everyone on the same page. Loki and Thor not so much. There are also some deeper reasons for their arrival.

Thor cursed the times he and Loki fought - especially in times like these when they managed to get divided because of their rowing, yes, but also in general. It was so difficult to get along sometimes.

Especially when Loki was hauled up after their small, bland breakfast, and wasn’t brought back to their small, bland cell before Thor himself was dragged away for interrogation. He didn’t know what time it was then, but judging by the empty halls it might have been close to noon. 

The same woman from before, Lady Maria Hill, still stood like a mountain, not listening to any answers Thor gave her. Thor was irritated by their troubling situation and lack of sleep, but he kept his back straight and his eyes stern. He was the god of thunder. He had strength in him.  
The interrogation started to repeat itself quickly. To be fair, he had tried his best to be as clear as possible, so he too repeated much of his previous words.  
He and Loki were the sons of Odin, the Allfather, the High King of the Gods. No, they weren’t from Sweden, and no, they most assuredly weren’t mortal men. 

“And why should I take anything you say at face value?” Lady Hill asked. Thor let out a deep sigh, working his jaw and not even bothering to conceal his frustration any longer. He wanted to say that there was an army on its way, or that he and Loki would crush this little resistance in a flash, but he knew both claims to be false. His hands itched for Mjölnir, but Thor didn’t summon the weapon that still lie quietly on the streets of Stockholm.  
They would try to cooperate. For now. At least it had worked well enough to get Loki free from the restraints on his magic.  
“I have to take your justification for this hostility at face value as well,” he told Hill, instead of ripping himself free of the chair. “I have yet to meet your ruler, and by our law your kind has thieved from Asgard’s possessions. And here I am, held as an unjustly taken prisoner.”  
“Locking you up after the death of several policemen and agents is the opposite of unjust. What are you, assassins?” Hill asked grimly. Thor set his jaw.  
“While you plan on converting the Tesseract into a weapon,” he scoffed, and it was not a question. Hill didn’t comment on it when she next opened her mouth.

Who were they? Princes rarely did the dirty work on Midgard. The thought amused Thor - no wonder that the realm was in such disarray.  
They had come to Midgard on behalf of all of Asgard. They were the right (and left) hand of the king, proclaiming their demands with his mouth and will. That was their justification. They were the highest, the greatest young men of Asgard.  
Hill didn’t approve of the explanation, which hardly felt surprising. Not anymore.

“Why will you not tell us the truth. Why did you attack us to get the Tesseract?  
“Why should my answers to Doctor Jane Foster not be a testament of my truth?”  
They would have the stone, whether or not the demand was to Midgard’s liking. They had once given it to the priests who still knew of men’s old relations to the Æsir. 

In the end, Hill told him that they were finished with the questioning. His word was not taken as worth anything, and for that Thor cursed that Loki’s nerves were fraying so. Had he been there to help Thor speak for their cause, everything would have been easier. Loki was the better speaker of the two of them, Thor himself more skilled at simply talking. He had gravity and charisma, but Loki had the skill to put on a show.  
As it was, Loki had mixed the mead of their brotherhood with blood and spite, once again, and was unavailable to help. A difficult companion he was. Thor was escorted back to their cell, handcuffed again.

Loki was shoved in soon after, and he must have still been furious from their row, for he said nothing. Or so Thor thought before he caught his brother with a very tricky sort of expression on his features.

Loki had the strangest way of smiling with the corners of his mouth turned downwards.

Thor hardly sought for an argument, even though he never backed away from a fight either. Loki was the exact opposite, constantly longing for conflict, for friction, but never prepared to plow through the mess afterwards.  
Mother had once said that they fit together as well as iron and flintstone that repeatedly hit each other. They would send sparks flying each time they met until they had chipped and blunted each other too hard to go on, worn from the relentless beating. And it didn’t only fit their physical fights, even though those were likely what Frigga had first meant with her words.

If he was Bosi, fighting for glory and making friends along the way, changing his plans when needed to serve his own sense of morals and justice, then Loki was Gísli. A fiercely loyal, but vengeful and spiteful man, who dreamed of his own death. Who would scheme and kill for an oath-bound friend instead of forgiving his own kin.  
Thor hoped that he was to Loki, on that very moment, a friend first and a brother second.

 

/ / / /

 

“So what Loki told Randolph,” Rogers said, “and what HYDRA are after - were after - is that the Tesseract is a ‘gateway through space’?”  
“Yeah,” Jane Foster nodded. “Um… All my calculations point out to there being an actual process of nuclear fusion going on inside the structure of the Tesseract, but the heat and radiation it emits are a real obstacle for studying the properties better. I have no idea what the outer layer consists of. The heat inside the cube must be even higher than outside to break through Coulomb’s barrier to allow for fusion, but… we don’t really have a scale to measure that. Or I don’t. Not yet at least.”

Stark and Banner joined in and Clint zoned out after that. He’d never been one for maths or science, or anything more complicated than his paycheck and his groceries, really.  
The conference room was packed full, and Director Fury was sitting at the end of the long table with the look of a man who would no longer be surprised if a herd of cows ran through the wall. For an hour already he had been listening to the incoherent accounts of SHIELD personnel, civilians and the Avengers, rolling his eye and probably wishing for a retirement.  
Maybe Clint was just projecting his own feelings.

“All right people, I think that’s about enough of Stockholm and the energy project for now,” the director said. “What about the Swedish empire themselves? Let’s focus on them.”

“Yeah Nick, I’m sorry to be the party pooper, but we don’t really know shit about them. How did they even find the tesseract?” Stark called out from the other end of the table where he was sitting with Banner and Rogers. Clint sighed.  
“How can’t we be sure that they aren’t just, you know, two guys gone a bit nuts with this neo-nazi mess - really, i’m not just saying this for Steve here ” Clint said. Yeah, maybe it was sad and it was childish, but he _really_ didn’t want to imagine an entire world of aliens like Thor and Loki looming over their heads.  
“National extremists do have supporters in Sweden and the neighbouring countries. They seriously call themselves Soldiers of Odin,” Tasha spoke up, shrugging a little. _Yes. Thank you._  
“I think that most of the population, or historians,” Clint said and looked at Randolph who agreed with a nod, “aren’t obviously really happy about that but, you know. It’s apparently still happening.”

There was a little cough.

“Well there’s the, uh, the DNA tests we took. No match for the super soldier serum… no match for the X-gene found in most mutants, and… uh,” the other half of Agents Fitzsimmons started. Coulson’s private… interns or something. The Scottish one.  
“And they’re not really human either. We can’t know what they are, because they don’t match anything completely,” the female Fitzsimmons said to finish her partner’s sentence. She might have been a part of the biochemical team if Clint’s brain was telling him the truth.  
The mousier one of the young research agents opened up a few holographic files with his pad, and the neat young woman sighed beside him. Several curious, confused and irritated looks were aimed at them. “Some of the samples give us more human results, some less, and most of it keeps changing.”  
“Especially... with Loki,” the Scottish boy (Fitz?) added with a warily curious tone, blowing up a picture of two still unfinished chemical graphs. “One of the blood samples turned, um, blue while we were running tests. Literally sky-blue, no less, and it wasn’t that the iron levels of the sample had dropped or anything that we did, but -”  
“What?” Banner asked, clearly waking up from his thoughts, and put on his reading glasses to look through the test result papers someone shoved past Clint. “What _did_ you do to it?”  
“We froze it. Chilled it, actually,” probably-Simmons said, fiddling with her pen and going on with the sort of trembling voice that people used when they were really excited about something. “The sample made up new pH chromophores for its own alkaline level and added haemocyanin into its structure, also refusing to freeze. It might be about increasing the acid and salt levels of the plasma. Whatever the reason it turned blue, just as Fitz said. Almost like the blood they extract from horseshoe crabs.”  
“How?” Bruce asked, struggling to find words and looking at the two in confusion. Fitz and Simmons were left shrugging, and everyone else had already lost the main points of the conversation.

“That sounds like aliens to me,” Natasha said. Clint groaned openly.  
“They seem like they’re pretty sure about not being human, and it sounds to me like we have the evidence to support that. We should move past the ‘what if’ stage and start thinking about the rest of their talk,” Steve said firmly. “What are they going to do if they get the stone, and how far are they willing to go if they don’t.”  
“I’d also like to point out for everyone that we still don’t have shit on their skills, the statistics of their weapons _or_ their physical durability, because we have no idea how hard they’re holding their punches.” Tony said.  
“If they’re aliens, it could be anything,” Clint grumbled. “Guess Foster and Randolph are our best leads on that right now. She knows space and he knows vikings.”

 

/ / / /

 

It had been odd to see Loki before the doors to Father’s drawing room one night, standing quietly in the dimly lit hallway. So still and silent.  
They had both been summoned separately from their personal businesses and had happened to arrive at the exact same moment, standing side by side for the first time in what had felt like an age. Only a year.  
“Do you think this is about the frost giants?” Thor had asked slowly.  
“No. We didn’t start it. Do you think this is about the dwarf lords?” Loki had asked in return, not blinking, not turning his eyes from the door. Even if Loki had most assuredly started the riot on Jötunheim eight months ago, Thor hadn’t wanted to shove that nest again.  
“No. It was a fair fight and the man survived with minor burns,” Thor had replied. The drunken dwarf battle that followed the Jötun riot was, of course, not his fault. The man had merely happened to stumble in between the fire and the front of his boot, just when Thor had demonstrated a kick he had aimed at a frost hound the previous day. He couldn’t have known that the impact would send the dwarf flying into a bonfire.  
And they said nothing more until the doors to father’s study had opened.

They had both been wrong, for yes, it was indeed about the frost giants, and yes, it was about the dwarf lords. Apparently it was also about the Tesseract, the meddling Midgardian men who took care of it, and Thor and Loki's incapability of handling the nearing coronation like _any sensible, grown men of the court should, instead quarreling with everyone and everything with ourageous lack of common sense like a pair of unruly stray dogs!_  
There had been a lot of hissing, shouting, slamming hands on tabletops and throwing insults back and forth. It had been one of their more brutal conversations in recent decades. 

“You do not deserve the honour of calling yourself princes, of calling yourselves my sons,” Father had spat, Thor and Loki standing frozen with anger and shame like school boys of days long gone, “when you degrade yourselves like this with your own brazen actions. You could drive us into an inter-realm crisis! Both of you! You are an _embarrassment_ to me!”  
Sadly fghts between the three of them never ended there. 

“Father!” Thor yelled out loud. A heavy silence fell after Odin had physically attacked Loki, with a roar and a pair of fists at Loki’s collar, and all of that only for the unfortunate thing that Loki had dared to open his mouth for the first and last time in a while. And only then did the argument truly wane away.

“You of all people should understand the tensions between our nations,” Father had sighed to Loki after smoothing the shoulders of his coat in a notably gentler manner. His hands were firm on the fabric, carved from stone.  
“Of course,” whispered Loki, whose fierce, anger-shaken stare was still chilling Thor down to the bone-marrow.  
“You two will be sent to Midgard, and you _shall_ retrieve the Gemstone, even if only to restore it to its rightful place,” Odin had declared, looking and sounding weary and disappointed.  
“As if it was my fault that the mortals are working like filthy-” Thor had snapped, but their father’s raised hand was louder.  
“Should the stone not be returned to Asgard by the first day of winter,” Odin had added, looking at Thor with an almost cold expression, “there _will be_ no crowning of a new Regent come spring. If not by summer, either, I shall have to see into reinstating the elections of the High Council. And they will see to planning the new time frame for the succession of the Crown. Prove to me that you are men, and no longer boys. Then I just might start treating you as such.”

No further arguments were listened to after that point. In all truth, no further arguments were said after that point either. Loki had been the first one to bend and bow down, his eyes on the floor, and Thor had grudgingly followed.  
As if all of this was his fault. As if all of the Nine Realms were on his shoulders. And even if they were soon to be, even if he would gladly be a leader of his people and a dealmaker between parties, he refused to be a _scapegoat_. Loki had disappeared without even a goodbye, and Thor had been left with no one else to share his anger with.  
He had been fuming with rage, and vented it all out by destroying an old table in one of the kitchens, and then spending the rest of his night apologising to the staff.

They had met in front of Mother’s chambers in the morning. Loki was there already when Thor arrived. Mother was holding Loki’s hands as they turned to greet Thor, and when Thor bowed down for her she kissed him on the forehead.

“Look after your brother for me, Loki,” Frigga said when she returned to her and Loki’s conversation. Her voice had still remained gentle, but with a different kind of softness. It was a tone that said ‘I _know_ that you can do it, and trust you to do it _well_ ’. A voice like that wielded a very sharp and sincere blade.  
There was a clear sort of sobriety in Loki’s expression, something very serious and very deeply honour-bound that Thor couldn’t quite name. He had never really seen something like that from Loki before.  
It must have been something between Mother and Loki only, when Loki nodded firmly, without saying a word. Frigga smiled and hugged him with the collected formality of a queen, but her smile was that of a worried mother already longing for their return. Loki accepted Frigga’s gesture, hugging her back and kissing her softly on both cheeks.  
Thor felt like an intruder. He wondered what they had been talking about before he arrived  
“I will do my best to ensure that he comes back on his own two legs, Mother,” Loki promised then, glancing at Thor with a more familiar glint in his eye. He bowed to Mother with a fist on his heart and kissed the rings on her left hand.  
Thor was surprised by the punch Loki threw at his ribs when he passed, grinning, and he laughed as he watched Loki go. 

_It would have been a very worrying stab, had Loki been holding an actual weapon._

Frigga let out a soft breath. It became a worried sigh only for those who truly knew her. She put a gentle hand on Thor’s arm, but there was tension in her touch when she turned to look at him.  
“Thor,” she said softly, leaning closer. “I fear for him now, after all that has happened again, with... With young Sigyn, and with Jötunheim. I pray, look after him, and make good of this new time you have been gifted to introduce yourselves to each other again.”  
“I will,” Thor said firmly. Frigga’s eyes were seeking his, and he let out a breath he had half been holding. She was close to tears.  
_Oh Mother._  
“I will keep him in check. You know that we have survived worse,” Thor promised her and hugged her tightly. “And he is strong, just as I am. We will bring you victory.”  
“Don’t forget to bring me back my peace of mind,” Mother smiled and patted his cheek. 

“We might die,” Loki had said with a dry sigh when they rode along the Bifröst bridge. “Many have died before.”  
“And many more have survived. We all die sooner or later,” Thor had snorted back. He had been irritated by Loki’s morbid humour back then, but now he thought that his brother might have actually been voicing a serious worry. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm apparently having a real burst of inspiration, and instead of writing as much flesh for my further outlines, I used it all to finish and wrap up this chapter.  
> I am anxious to get to the next one already, because the situation will change again from this settled state it's in.
> 
> Can anyone guess what will happen? :D


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> People keep asking the wrong questions, Jane and Darcy have a chat with Steve, and Professor Randolph and Loki have a second round of chatting.

Morning light was great after a stuffy conference room and a sleepless night. What wasn’t so great, however, was that the see-through screens that SHIELD for some reason had installed everywhere didn’t really work when bright rays of sunshine were coming through them, and directly into Jane’s eyes. It was a pain to use them in the office they had made their fort, but going to the underground floors gave Jane chills.

So, she was stuck with her lagging laptop. The trusty companion she had dragged with her wherever she went for the past five years.

“Darcy?” Jane asked from the computer without turning around. She was trying to piece together the solution for her wonky math that refused to work like it should have. Where was the mistake?  
“Mhm?” Darcy asked, assuring Jane that she was still there. Erik had left to get them breakfast, probably.  
“Can you get me the magnetic readings on the tesseract?”  
“Sure. Do you want fries with that?” Darcy sighed.  
“Ha ha. I’m serious, I need them.”  
“Yeah, I’m trying to find them, just takes a while. What do you need magnetism for?”  
“I’m trying to see if the electric strength needed to… well, if the whole thing matches the weird spikes of UV-radiation that we also measured,” she said. Darcy was silent for a while and Jane could hear the wheels of her swivel chair moving. 

“Ja-ane,” Darcy said with an airy tone and poked her on the shoulder. Jane sighed and threw her hands up in the air.  
“Yeah, okay? I’m trying to see if we... could, potentially, open a wormhole.”  
“Sweet,” Darcy smiled wide, and waved a bunch of printed-out readings in Jane’s face. “Oh, hey, here’s your magnet papers.”  
Jane accepted the offered readings happily and started to go through them. Darcy went back to her personal bullet journal and their common project journal - project journal which had by now turned into more of an ‘oh my god, aliens!’ journal.

“I need to get a permission to test the Tesseract freely, Darcy,” Jane said. She put the papers down after staring at them silently for a few minutes. Darcy looked up at her.  
“Okay,” she said. Jane huffed, but it was really hard to decide if she was annoyed or excited.  
“And not just because Erik thinks that Tony Stark is bossy. I really think that… that I could be able to actually open a portal if I got all the tools and materials to build a base for it,” Jane admitted at length. She looked up at Darcy, and her intern was staring at her with wide eyes.

“Wow. That’s… a sentence I never thought I’d hear.”  
“Darcy, we’re this close to unlocking proper space travel!” Jane said, showing a tiny distance between her thumb and pointer finger. “This close to proving that my theory is valid.”  
“Okay, I just -”  
“Darcy,” Jane begged. “Darcy, it’s less than an inch!”  
“Yeah, yeah I get it, it’s amazing, but Jane, Jane!” Darcy pleaded in return, kicking her chair closer to look Jane in the eye.  
“What?”  
“We’re in the middle of a secret agent hideout! Even this room’s probably bugged,” Darcy whispered. “It’s gonna be _pretty_ difficult for us to get all that space stuff without getting into trouble.”  
Jane sighed. Of course she knew that they couldn’t just walk up to Agent Coulson or whoever it was that was in charge here, and that she could lose the opportunity to continue with her research. _But still._

“Well… we could try a thing,” Jane said slowly.  
“You’re not thinking…?” Darcy asked without finishing the question. She looked at Jane with a look that said _‘Jane no’_ very loudly.  
“I might be,” Jane shrugged airily. _Jane yes._ “It’s a possibility. Ok, I admit, a slightly freaky and reckless one - but still a possibility.”  
“...Or we could just say that we need to fix a toaster for the poptarts annnd… we need some really high tech rare metals because otherwise it’s not going to stay in shape for the next few years?”  
“We could try that too, but like you just said, we’d still be in trouble.”

“Excuse me?” Steve Rogers asked as he knocked on the door. Jane jumped in her chair.  
“Hi, how’s it going?” she blurted out as a first response, which was a really bad one considering the situation. Luckily Darcy was no better off.  
“No way, Captain America! Wow. Hi! I’m Darcy.”  
Steve Rogers looked at the both of them for a while before putting up a smile and offering his hand for Darcy.  
“Hi Darcy, Steve Rogers,” he said with a smile and shook her hand. “It’s nice to meet you,” he added, and sounded like he didn’t really fit in the situation but tried his best. Darcy smiled like… like a really smiling person, and Jane tried to hide her own laugh before the captain turned to look at her again. 

“Doctor Foster, are you busy right now? Sorry if I interrupted something,” he asked, and he seemed serious.  
“Yeah, sort of. But I mean… it’s okay. Why are you here?” Jane said.  
“Tony Stark thinks that Thor might be after you,” Steve Rogers said bluntly, and it was nothing Jane expected. His tone softened a little when he explained more, even if it didn’t make more sense. “Well, Tony thinks that Loki thinks that. So just in case something odd starts to surface, I just wanted to let you know.”

“What...?” Jane asked after a short pause.  
“Where the hell did he get that idea?” Darcy demanded and crossed her arms. Rogers shook his head in a way that said ‘I wish I knew’ as much as any words could.  
“Thor and Loki were arguing over something early yesterday morning,” he explained, searching for his words. “Something Loki said was apparently referencing a story about, uh, a man trying to… get his way with a lot of dames during a... mission.”  
“Dames. Really?” Darcy snorted, and Jane was torn between laughing at that and frowning at what Rogers had said. Rogers, who was nearly fidgeting now. Or would have been if he wasn’t a 200 pound military masterpiece  
“Ladies. Sorry,” he rushed to apologise. “Women.”

“Okay so…” Jane said and tried to wrap her head around the situation. Tony Stark thought that Loki and Thor were arguing about her based on… what, a single interrogation? And Steve Rogers was worried about her not knowing. “So actually Loki is the only one who’s worrying about anything real now? If he is,” she checked. Rogers nodded firmly.  
“Yeah. And I don’t want to scare you away, this mission clearly needs your whole team. I just thought I should-”  
“Thanks. I’m not going to run from something like this because you’re worried about… an alien having a crush on me,” Jane assured him. “God, that sounded weird.”  
“At least he’s a handsome alien and not like… slime.”  
“Thanks Darcy,” Jane said. Now Steve Rogers was smiling too, even if it was a really small smile.  
“It was nice of you to give me a heads-up before someone here gets any stupid ideas. Thank you,” she told him.  
“Any time.”

“What are you studying today?” the captain asked, crossing his arms but clearly curious. Jane wasn’t sure what she could say that he would understand easily enough, but his interest was making her feel better about their situation in the whole project.

“Jane’s going to make a wormhole,” Darcy happily provided before Jane had a chance. “A portal, you know. We could be in space any minute.”  
“I am not making a wormhole!” Jane told her with just a little bit shrill tone, looking at Darcy very pointedly. Darcy shrugged, and when they turned back to Steve Rogers, he seemed a lot more worried than he had done moments prior. Which was already a lot.  
“Then what are you doing? he asked.  
“...Just counting the hypothetical requirements for a stable wormhole that the Tesseract could power,” Jane lied as reassuringly as she could, and felt really bad about it. “To see if Loki’s words might hold true.”  
“Okay,” Steve Rogers said and set his jaw. Even if his voice was firm and steady, he looked a bit pained and spent a little while looking off into the distance, before letting out a heavy breath.

“I saw it do that,” he said and looked back at Jane and Darcy. “Open up a… a portal to space.”  
“You saw it do- wha- when?” Jane asked and jumped up, and she heard Darcy’s _’nooooo way’_ as well. The Avengers saw the cube open up an actual Einstein-Rosen Bridge and no one told her? She was here to study the cube! Before Jane could start screaming, Steve Rogers’ suddenly pretty embarrassed expression silenced her.  
“It was, um… 1944,” he said.  
Jane’s hands flopped against her sides.

“Oh, right,” she said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’m just… in the middle of my research, and. Um.”  
“I know, yeah. That’s why I’m telling you,” Rogers said with a smile and a nod and Jane sighed in relief. “It opens portals but it’s dangerous as… really dangerous. It just sucked him away.”  
“Who?” Darcy asked. Rogers frowned a little.  
“Johann Schmidt. The Red Skull. He was the leader of HYDRA, an occult scientist and a real madman. He had the Tesseract before SHIELD forfeited it,” he said.  
“What was he doing with it?” Darcy asked. “That sounds really nasty.”  
“He was using it to make weapons that can... burn a man to ash in seconds. The Tesseract did the same to him when he held it, and opened a portal. Howard Stark was studying the guns and the cube. We never really -” Steve Rogers started, but cut himself off abruptly with a very confused look on his face.

“Tony Stark said something about that when we were running a few tests the Tesseract,” Jane said carefully. “You don’t think that…?” she asked, but didn’t finish her sentence either.  
Did Steve Rogers think that SHIELD was doing that now - secretly weaponizing the cube they knew next to nothing about? That this Asgard might actually have been… doing countermeasures? Captain America was looking almost shocked and it made Jane pretty uneasy, even if she wanted to believe in the ethics of science.

“Is that why they allow Tony Stark in here? Because he and his dad have been involved with all kinds of crazy weapons?” Darcy asked tentatively.  
“I know that Tony’s not in this for weapons,” Rogers said. “But I don’t know about SHIELD. I’ve got to... check a few things. Talk with Tony about the Asgardians. Thank you for the talk, and…”  
“We’ll let each other know if something happens?” Jane suggested, seeing his hurry to leave the situation smoothly. Captain Rogers smiled and nodded and thanked them and disappeared as quickly as he had arrived.

“Wow,” Darcy said. “If Captain America is scared shitless, what are we going to do.”  
“I don’t know,” Jane admitted.  
“I brought you waffles,” Erik called from the door. “The canteen is awful so I sneaked out to drive uptown to get them. Was that Captain America who just rushed past me?”

 

/ / / / 

 

Elliot was staring at Loki, unamused, once again. The interrogation room was stuffy and the air was dry. He had left the tie in his suitcase, for the tension in the small space had been suffocating enough already, and he could do without anything extra wrapped around his collar.  
Loki was almost smiling, but not quite happily enough for Elliot to call it such.

“Well?” the arrogant prince asked after another painfully long stretch of silence. Elliot could only imagine what Loki was filling it with for Agent Romanoff and her friends. He hoped that the charade could be over soon.  
“Well? Are you not entertained by our situation, your Highness,” Elliot shot back with perhaps a hint too much acid. The boy noticed and laughed at him without joy.

“This? No, this is better than I had imagined. Would you care to tell me which battalion you fled?” Loki asked, and Elliot blinked. The prince was leaning forward and standing very close to the barrier between them, with a strange and very insincere sort of curiosity written all over his grinning face. Father of wolves all right.  
“The South-Western Harbour,” Elliot said curtly. There was no need try dodge the question any longer. “It was a Berserker group.”  
“Truly? I’ve met some of your brethren, then. That must be the spell I sensed upon your person,” Loki said with a satisfied quirk of his lips. Elliot wanted to punch him. “Strong magic, _berserkja_ craft. When I was still a boy, I used to look up to you fierce warriors. Envy you for your gifts.”  
“You must have been very young back then,” Elliot said, leaving out the rest of what he wanted to spit out. The Staff was no gift, the runes no blessing. Not for those who had no other options left.  
“Why, thank you,” Loki scoffed.

“I doubt you’re lacking on the gifts department either, your Highness,” Elliot said mildly, not really looking at Loki’s scarred forearms and wrists any more than before, but even the focus of just his thoughts seemed to be enough. Loki glanced over his shoulder, down at his bound arms, but the infuriating crooked smile didn’t fade.  
“Trial and error, let’s put it that way,” he said, and Elliot was honestly more than a little disgusted by that. He had been using the Staff for… what, a century at most. Perhaps eighty years. If Loki had picked up the craft shortly after his giving it up, the prince must have been hitting himself with the full force of it for close to five centuries by now. There was definitely something off inside the poor boy’s head.  
“What were you trying to do?” Elliot asked, but didn’t let Loki’s chilly eyes force him to anything more than an innocent shrug. He was not asking out of sympathy, he just wanted to know.  
“To cope,” Loki smiled, disgustingly sweetly.  
“With what, may I ask? Call me curious,” Elliot said. Loki’s smile disappeared.  
“With all the Æsir,” he said coldly.

“There must be a lot of pressure in the court. I still find it hard to imagine life there, even after I’ve grown accustomed to Midgardian nobility every now and then,” Elliot said. Something in Loki’s posture changed, and Elliot feared that he might have crossed a line.  
“I do not think that the courtly customs would be fit for peasants like you. You would not survive a single week,” Loki said, cold and professional and noble. Courtly customs. Elliot would have laughed if it had been a joke. What followed was a smile as sweet as ash on Loki’s lips.  
“That is why you all take up the Berserk Staff, is it not? You’re too poor to enter the training required of highest Einherjar and too lowly to get there without,” Loki said. “You give away your control in exchange for power.”  
As if the words hadn’t included the prince himself.

“If poverty is a crime, my Lord, then my dear mother and father - may their souls rest in Hel’s halls - were most guilty, as they were stonemasons,” Elliot said calmly and slowly after a long moment of _what the fuck_ ringing loudly inside his head. “Luckily I no longer live in Asgard. It’s much easier to make decisions for myself here. On Midgard.”  
“They must have been proud of you when you left them for this filthy rock,” Loki said and looked around them. Elliot couldn’t help but wonder - as the barrier between them finally disappeared with a hiss when Loki walked through to his side - if someone had actually carved the heart out of that boy. The nobility were all mad, Elliot knew that much, but he hadn’t thought it was this bad.

“How do they not keep you muzzled and chained all the time?” he asked Loki while the prince was walking circles around him.  
“Me? Oh, but I am a delight,” Loki replied with an airy laugh.  
“I believe that, your Highness.”  
“Then why is it that you seem so doubtful when you tell me this?”  
“I merely heard that you and his Royal Highness - your brother - had a row last night and the night before,” Elliot said, keeping his eyes in front of him like Loki was still standing there. “Or is he his Majesty already?”

There was a sound of a few metallic clicks. Loki walked past his shoulder again and dropped his handcuffs on the floor.

“My brother is as intelligent as a pickled herring when it comes to planning and eventually executing said plans. That, I am afraid, I cannot help,” Loki said courteously when he stopped in front of Elliot again. “But I do my best.”  
“You are still an arrogant child compared to your brother, my lord,” Elliot ground out. It was clear from Loki’s narrowed eyes and frozen smile that that particular choice of words and title was not appreciated.

“ _And thou a frontline runaway,_ ” Loki said coldly. Elliot didn’t avert his eyes.  
“It is treason, is it not?” Loki asked, clearly enjoying the chance to sneer at him. Elliot kept quiet, forcing himself to stay still even though he truly wanted nothing more than to punch Loki hard in the nose on that very moment.  
“High treason no less, _directly_ against the Crown. Thou, my own countryman, are a traitor of the worst kind,” Loki mockingly declared, walking circles around Elliot again and articulating the blunt and ridiculously archaic _thou_ clearly in place of every _you_ that would have shown even the slightest respect towards Elliot. It wasn’t exactly surprising, but it also wasn’t something that he had heard in a long time.  
“It would do good to remember who is in charge of thy leash,” Loki drawled without even trying to sound friendly anymore. He changed like the weather. “For even if thy long years on Midgard have made _you_ , oh mighty _god_ , think it to be thyself, it is a false belief. I have the power to take away everything that is yours on this pathetic fleck of dirt. One simple whisper to gain Heimdall’s attention, a word to the Allfather... I wouldn’t want to stand in thy boots then.”  
“...is there something in particular that your Royal Serenity would wish to hear from me?” Elliot asked as calmly as he could, when it at last sounded like Loki was finished. He was no fool, and he knew when to stand down. The answer he got was still a sharp and unnatural chuckle.  
“My, my, bricklayer. Are you bargaining for your freedom?” Loki asked, his voice an amused purr. 

Oh, how Elliot hated the prince's height and his young spry form. He was twice as old as the entitled giant’s bastard, born to work and trained to be a soldier. He had seen the worlds, and he had lived through centuries of Midgard’s hectic history.  
And still he felt like an old rat in front of a young hunting terrier with Loki by his shoulder. He was not going to start stuttering, no. He was not returning to Asgard because Loki told him to.  
Elliot knew that he shouldn’t have risen to the bait, but it was already clear that Loki could just as well go on without any extra help. He might as well have complimented Loki’s outfit or said out loud that all the Royals were poisonous toadstools on top of a dunghill. The result wouldn’t have changed.

“If I may ask,” Elliot inquired slowly. "There must be a reason for your sudden... interest in me.” Loki circled behind him once again and hummed in amusement, placing a wide, bony hand firmly on his shoulder. Elliot could feel the abnormal temperature through his suit jacket and shirt. He had to wonder, for a moment, whether Loki did it intentionally or if his hands were always like that. Must have been a fun party trick - it felt like being touched by a child of Hel’s barren lands.  
The cold fingers tapped Elliot’s shoulder lightly as Loki spoke, leaning closer.  
“There might be a favour or two I will have to ask from you at some point. But for now I just want you to know, bricklayer, that I know who you are,” the prince whispered gently, suddenly back in his earlier courteous tone. Somehow that was more unsettling than his threats. The grip of Loki’s cold hand was getting very uncomfortable on Elliot’s shoulder.  
“And what would your Royal Serenity ask in return of your silence?” Elliot asked if only to get out of the situation alive. This was not a man moved by common goals or common sense, no noble ever was. 

Loki was silent for a long while, his hold on Elliot’s shoulder stilling, then softening. When he spoke his voice was a failed attempt to disguise daggers as butter knives.  
“Why I would want a thing from you that you could freely offer, is a question I would never have thought to hear with my own ears,” Loki hissed out from between clenched teeth. Elliot stood frozen when the prince continued.  
“You worthless. Little. Nithing,” Loki breathed, articulating every syllable sharply and clearly, leaning so close to his ear that he was hovering over Elliot’s shoulder. 

Nithing. That was a new one for him.

A traitorous coward. An honourless criminal. A wretched rat. Pick your poison, really, the meaning didn’t translate wholly, but it was rude.

Elliot had always prided himself on his rationality and peaceful nature, but something in that stung, and stung hard. He couldn’t help but stare at Loki for a long while.  
This bloodthirsty boy, this pathetic, noble hypocrite - after insulting Elliot’s whole life and all of his choices and his experiences that spanned at least twice as far as the prince’s own - was now stooping so low as to dig up the ugliest and simplest one-word insults of all known language.  
And still had the mind to think that he could beat a mason’s son in foul language. The arrogance was impossible to wrap his head around.

“Says the court ergi,” replied Elliot after a short silence. The hand on his shoulder twitched and disappeared.

As far as it goes, at least Elliot could defend himself by saying that the first punch wasn’t his.  
It met his face with the full force of a young Berserk.

 

/ / / /

 

When Steve had first said ‘hi, we need to talk’, Tony hadn’t expected to be confronted with all the worries that he had thrown around as jokes. But here they were, in Fury’s office, and not one of them pleased.  
Fury deserved it, that bastard.

“Why does SHIELD use the Tesseract to create weapons of mass destruction?” Tony asked as airily as he could, which was ‘not very’. Fury rolled his eye like he didn’t know what they were raving about. Steve was standing at the door with his arms crossed on his pecs and eyebrows scrunched together.  
“Stark, that’s not what’s happening,” Fury said. Tony didn’t listen.  
“Because if SHIELD does, and has picked up where HYDRA and my father left, then this situation is something entirely different than any of us have been lead to believe,” he went on. “We are the possible future terrorists, and they are the preventive American peace troops.”  
“Mister Stark, I can-”  
“I have seen what that attitude does!” Tony snapped. Hadn’t they already fucked up badly enough on their own planet? Did they really have to start playing rough with super-powered alien kingdoms? “Does SHIELD make Tesseract weapons or not? Yes or no. Not really that difficult question, Nick.”  
“That’s classified beyond your clearance level, and you know that. You’re a consultant at best.”  
“Yeah, and when this consultant is on the field out there, and a fucking nuclear laser sucks me into space, I can’t fix it with a bit of tinkering. If someone’s house blows up or we have aliens swarming on our door in a year, that’s not something the Avengers can stop just by throwing Mister American Dream under the bus,” Tony said. “If I die from this clusterfuck blowing up, I will come back to haunt you from another universe if I have to.”

Fury didn’t bat an eye, just looked at Tony like a very tired man would look at an annoying school kid in a library.  
“Shit… Steve, say something,” he huffed and slumped in his chair by Fury’s desk. Steve shook his head with a really tiny motion.  
“I really don’t know what to say. Did you tell the others?”  
“Yeah, I told Bruce. I’d think Mr and Mrs Smith knew already,” Tony groaned. Fury let out a displeased sound.  
“I’d appreciate it if the Avengers didn’t spend their time on gossip.”  
“Director, sorry to say this, but without anything solid we’re not left with much else,” Steve said, and judging by his tone the sassy bastard was anything but sorry. “I think it’s clear now that they didn’t come here on a whim. We should really start proper negotiations.”  
“That’s not going to happen,” Fury simply told them. Tony sat up again and frowned. “They’ll be transported into a more secure location as soon as I get it approved. Tomorrow at the very latest. They’re an active threat.”  
“Give them something to eat. Let them have a fucking shower, maybe they’ll be more cooperative,” Tony said, still beyond frustrated with everything. “I know I’d be.”  
“We can’t start coddling them if we want to hold them in check,” Fury scoffed like it should have been obvious. Tony couldn’t decide whether to laugh or stare at the guy like a dying fish.  
“Okay, tonight I’m just gonna go home as a consultant with no further business with your freak show. Bruce agreed to join me, so I hope-”

Natasha was yelling something into the emergency communications line.  
“Speak up, Agent Romanoff. What’s happening?” Fury asked. Convenient much.  
_“Loki and Professor Randolph are at each other’s throats, I need backup! Over!”_  
“Yeah, we’ll send someone there, just hold on for a -” Tony huffed, but a loud crash from Natasha’s end of the line cut him off.  
_“This is not a drill! Repeat, I need that backup now. They’re literally at each other’s throats wrestling on the floor, killing each other. Get down here!”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And then they fought. Dear god I've been so EXCITED about getting to this point of the story! :D
> 
> Thank you for all the lovely comments again, you people are amazing and I love you


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha, Tony and Steve are paid way too little for solving this crap. Tony and Steve... are they even paid for Avenging?  
> (Was that a tooth?)  
> Oh, also, Jane decides to get things done and the plot finally moves a little.

It was the same unholy overtone scream from the deepest pits of hell somewhere, which Tony had heard when Cap had first bashed Loki to the head with his shield. What worried Tony the most right then was that it was actually audible through two sets of sealed doors.

“After you, Captain,” Tony said as calmly as he could when the suit at last closed around him. Damn Fury and all of SHIELD - this was exactly why they should have kept civilians out of this mess, and try not to make it a mess in the first place. Cap only had his shield and one of the dart-loaded sedative guns, but then again he was also made of something a lot sturdier than Tony himself. Made sturdier by those before Tony.

After they rushed through the first door, the screaming was joined by a series of heavy thuds. Natasha was standing by the door, staring at them with eyes wider than Tony had ever seen. He must have looked at her with the same exact expression - agent or not, her training was talking people into doing things, not wrestling away something like… whatever it was that was waiting for them. Iron Man and Captain America or not, Tony had no clue how they were supposed to stop it either. The surveillance cameras didn’t look promising. Loki and Randolph really were down on the floor.  
“I don’t know what happened,” Natasha said curtly and glanced at one of the screens - approaching troops. “They were talking about the route Thor and Loki took around Stockholm, and then… all hell,” she huffed, and the rest was mumbled in Russian. Tony nodded before the faceplate of his suit closed and Steve rushed to the door.  
“Also, Loki’s no longer wearing the handcuffs,” Natasha said. Amazing.

When Cap rammed through the door, Tony aimed. Jarvis didn’t have to be told where to lock the target. It was obvious enough.

The thudding sound in the room came from every single hit the floor took from the back of Randolph’s skull. Judging by the bruises on the professor’s face Loki had been slamming it to the concrete for a while already.

There were dents on the _floor_.

Loki, in his ill-fitting blue prison clothes, was crouched over Randolph, still screaming. He had both of his wide palms wrapped around the professor’s throat and jaw, knuckles white and veins straining over tendons, squeezing as hard as he could. His face was flushed red and he was breathing ragged and frantic like a racehorse, eyes and nostrils wide.  
Tony had seen those animals after a run, and even they seemed friendly and tame compared to Loki. 

“ _Sir, may I suggest immediate action_ ,” Jarvis said. There was a bloody dent on the wall too, about as high as Randolph’s face would have been, and it matched the red spot on his forehead. That little thing over there in the corner looked like a fucking _tooth_.

Randolph and Loki were both struggling to break the position they were stuck in - Loki tried to crush his whole weight on Randolph's windpipe and Randolph to throw Loki off of his chest, kicking his thigh against Loki’s back and struggling to break his hold.  
Loki’s nose was bleeding all over his mouth and chin, Ranolph's fists were bloody, and the older, shorter man was twisting Loki's forearm with so much pressure that the flesh was red and white and already bruised black.

Professor Randolph was wheezing in the chokehold, yeah, his jacket was torn and his shirt crumpled, and he had the beginnings of a black eye.  
But he wasn't dead. He was moments away from snapping Loki’s arm in two.

“Are you out of your fucking minds!” Steve suddenly snapped with all the resentment and authority of a 30s Brooklyn street kid after World War military training, and he held his shield like he too would soon gut someone. Tony almost cried a little. Almost.  
Loki’s wild eyes were unfocused when he looked up and the words he croaked out were just unintelligible noise. Probably in another language entirely. Randolph chose that moment of weakened focus to take a hold of Loki’s wrist and _crack it_ against his chest.  
“Hands off!” Cap barked again, and Loki choked out a pained yell. Tony didn’t know who Steve’s command was addressed to, but since neither Randolph nor Loki obeyed, he shot Loki in the face with his palm repulsor.  
It should have been a lot more satisfying than it was to see him tumble back from the impact. He yelled from the burn, or maybe just from the rage of being shot.

Steve shot Loki with the sedative before the man could climb up. One dart was enough that the loud cursing slowly melted away into a pretty pathetic whine. Loki lost most of his motor control quickly, crumbling from his knees down onto his stomach.  
Tony didn’t even want to think about what a shot like that would have done if ever stuck in _his_ arm.

“Hold your hands above your head,” Tony ordered Randolph, and gook a step closer to where the professor was coughing and wheezing. He seemed pretty out of it, but his hands flopped on the floor next to his head and he let out a weird little grunt. Steve let out a long breath that shook from relief. Loki groaned and wheezed.  
“Fuck,” Tony sighed, and Cap said: “Get up.”

For some insane reason Randolph did as he was told. For some insane reason the otherwise completely unremarkable middle-aged professor of Norse mythology actually _could_ still get up on his own after a beating like that. And he even let Steve escort himself through the door.  
The guy was a little shaken and his knees buckled once, but he shoved the help off when Steve offered his arm for support.

“Haul him up,” Natasha said from the door and nodded towards Loki, who had stilled quickly, and was now lying in a bloody heap on the floor and gasping for air. His hands were shaking like leaves even though he wasn’t really doing anything with them anymore.  
“We have to run some tests, ask some questions and get the muzzle back on before the drug fades. One and a half hour, tops, if he reacts the same way Thor does.”  
Great. Just what Tony had hoped when he said that he was going to leave the base already.

/ / / /

Jane shoved the backup memory sticks into her bag - because yes, she was poor and clumsy and she really stored most of her backup files on twelve separate USB sticks - and tried to fit in as much of her paper notes as possible too. Erik was closing the last cases of their scientific equipment which luckily wasn’t a lot.  
“Are we really evacuating the base?” he asked and looked out into the hall with worry.  
“I don’t know,” Darcy called back, searching frantically for something. Probably her headphones. Jane slid a folder of pictures between her notebooks and huffed in frustration.  
“All I really care about is keeping this research out of the hands of international weapons manufacturers,” she said over her shoulder. She was angry at the whole of SHIELD for keeping them in the dark.

The movement in the hall had quieted down a little and Jane looked at Erik questioningly. Could they leave already? He shrugged warily.  
“Looks to be as clear as it’s going to be any time soon,” Erik said. “The emergency call really freaked people out.”  
“Yeah? I’m part of freaked out! Why are we still here?” Darcy asked, grabbing the phase meter and her laptop in her arms and starting toward the hall. Erik stuffed his things into the huge blue Ikea bag by the door and hauled it over his shoulder. Jane had her own bag under her arm.  
Outside their window the sunshine disappeared like someone would have pulled a set of curtains closed. There was a deep, rumbling feeling that travelled through the air. It rolled through the whole building, but it was too far to yet be thunder.  
Starting to brew up to be a storm, yes. 

Jane and Darcy looked at each other. Darcy immediately shook her head and took a step back, and Jane felt actual despair lifting its head. Obviously Darcy had to see their situation, she _had to_. They needed to have this thing solved.  
“Darcy, come on, we've got to-”  
“Hey, no! Agent man Coulson told the top floors to start _‘voluntary pre-evacuation of the base’_! And I’m not staying if there’s an intergalactic war breaking out under our feet!” Darcy snapped. Erik raised his hand to say something, but didn’t get a turn. Jane was faster, and she did her best to keep from screaming. She really did.  
“Darcy, we need his information! We have to get to their cell!” Jane said, trying to talk some sense into her intern. How could she not see that they were on the verge of a breakthrough like no one had ever even dreamed of. And they had _one_ chance of getting it.  
“It’s on the fourth underground floor! There’s going to be like a hundred armed guards before we get there!” Darcy said, and was the first one to screech hysterically.  
“Jane,” Erik said, and even he sounded like he was losing his patience, which was something.  
“There’s not going to be a hundred guards, because they’re all going somewhere in this hurry -”  
“Somewhere not Asgard-related?” Darcy snapped. “Are you sure they’re not rushing down because of that Thor guy?”  
“Jane, really. Are you sure about this?” Erik asked, hushed and hasty. A group of agents ran past them. Jane sighed and frowned. 

She wasn’t going to give up now.

“Erik, get the car started,” Jane said and fixed her bag.  
“What?”  
“We’re leaving this place,” she told him, and looked at Darcy. “Me and Darcy are going to pick up our only piece of evidence up from the cellar now, but we’ll be right there.”

/ / / /

Thor felt the emotion more than heard the sound, but it was loud and intruding, ramming up against his consciousness with flaming rage. It was a crashing wave or a war hound’s cry.

_It hurts. It burns and bends and tears._  
_Bear’s arms and the heart of a fiery serpent._  
_Jaws of a wolf._

At first he jolted up from the sudden flash of foreign force against his own thoughts. It was so cold that it burned, and it didn’t take Thor long to recognise the voice of the screaming thoughts. The feel of them against his own. The frantic aggression behind them.

_Death to all who stand against us._  
_Against me. His bleeding heart in my hands._  
_Hel’s labour._

“Loki, no,” Thor breathed out and stood up. He knew that they had taken Loki further down inside the underground building, but these people had claimed that it was only for interrogation. What was happening?  
This was not how the day had been meant to go. They weren’t meant to fight.  
Not now, not yet.  
Thor took a deep breath and rushed to the end of their cell that faced the hallway to look out as far as he could. It was small blessing that Loki was reaching out to him, but at least he was reaching out. There were still guards outside the cell. It was ages since Thor had last had to feel something like this from his brother.

“Where is Loki? I demand to know!” Thor barked at them. They had to tell him what was going on. Both turned to look at him with learned, blank expressions, foolhardy in a moment like this.  
“He’s being interrogated, we told you as much,” one of them said.  
“Where is he?” Thor demanded again, hearing his own growing tension, and slammed his fists against the clear wall that was keeping him in. Their weapons were quickly trained at him.

“Stand back from that wall! We can gas the inside of it!”  
“You will tell me what is happening or you will not live to see tomorrow!” Thor yelled back at the stubborn fools. His brother's captors. His own captors. Both men stepped closer, but a scratching sound from one of their tools interrupted them. Thor couldn’t make out the words, but whoever tried to make contact was obviously alarmed.  
They turned around. Thor was struggling to get his breathing under control.  
“This is not a threat, this is a fact. You will get my brother back in here or I will crush your heads!” he yelled, but neither turned back. They ran into the maze of hallways.

_No._

They should never have waited this long, Loki had been right. The mortals could not be reasoned with. They were packs of vermin, and acted as was to be expected of such creatures.  
Thor called for Mjölnir with his whole being, and he felt her answer in the back of his mind. He felt the thunder in his veins, and he was ready to ram his way through the door of their cell with his bare hands.

Whatever dregs still remained of Loki’s brutal warning calls, they all suddenly ebbed away from the edges of Thor’s consciousness. Broke down like glass and all that was inside lost its shape, dried out. Disappeared from Thor's reach like smoke.

“Thor!” someone screamed just as he roared and banged his fist against the clear prison door. It was a female voice. A shrill tone that called him by name.  
_What?_

“You,” Thor ground out when he saw her, unable to decide which shade of anger to feel towards the star-studying woman that appeared from behind the corner. She was followed by another.  
“I think they’re trying to do something to your brother!” the stargazer said, sounding out of breath.  
“Do you think I know nothing?” Thor shouted, and saw both of them jump. How dare they come to him and start talking about Loki when he full well knew that something bad was happening. “Tell me where my brother is!”  
“I don’t know! But if you promise to help us, we can get you out! We’re leaving the base, and you want to leave too, right?” the woman said, rushing her words and moving her hands in a placating manner. “We can help you out and you can... find Loki and we can all get out of here!”  
“Jane,” the woman behind her squeaked, sounding worried, and yes, that had been her name. 

Jane Foster. She was looking at him, clearly expecting an answer. The corridor had quieted. Thor frowned.  
“And what are you trying to gain by this bargain?” he asked, but nonetheless leaned towards the two mortals. He needed to get out.  
“I need your help to study the tesseract. You say you know how it works. I want to know,” Jane Foster said, and her voice was raw. She even threw a hand up in the air and gave a strained laugh.  
“And why should you study it?” Thor asked slowly. The stone was coming to Asgard, but at least he could offer a thought in return for his freedom.  
“I want to know how the stars work.”

“Let me out. I must find my brother,” Thor said. He could feel the singing thunder inside Mjölnir stronger already. She was close. “After that, if your offer truly is an honest one and no harm befalls us, I will find you,” he promised, looking the mortal scholar with as solemn a look as he could in that situation.  
Jane Foster took a deep breath before visibly steeling herself. She nodded and stepped closer. Thor took a step back from the door of the cell so as not to loom over her.

“Can either of you pick locks? I need to rid myself of these handcuffs. And this door,” he said. The woman shook her head.  
“No, but one of the guys that ran past us gave us their clearance tag so we could get up from this floor. Darcy asked him nicely. It should work.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all the lovely comments and dor the patient wait! 
> 
> I just moved to a new town start my university studies on the other side of the country and it has been rally hectic for me. But I like it here and I'm back with my writing! Yay!
> 
> This chapter was one of those tricky in-betweens, but I managed to connect the following turn of the story to the earlier ones and now I like this path I've taken even more.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one is having fun, Loki is very confused, and Steve frowns at SHIELD operatives.

Where first was flesh and bone and Thor’s mind just at the end of his reach, there now was steel and stone and a buzzing pain inside his skull. The sounds around him were like thunder and the ringing of a thousand bells and horns.  
He was to maul and rip apart that wretched vermin, and all the rest too, but suddenly the struggle was gone. He lost control over his limbs, and even a crouch was too much to manage. Someone spoke but he couldn’t hear where when his heart hammered up in his throat.

They were inside his head.

Loki blinked against the lights and tried to move, but he couldn’t. The world swam by in hot waves. And he lost his grip on consciousness.

When he came to, he could feel blood rushing to his face, to his ears, the back of his skull. His eyes watered and his stomach turned.  
He was upside down, was he? There were hands everywhere. He couldn’t breathe. He needed _air_. He needed _help. Thor, help._

 _What happened?_  
He didn’t know, he really couldn’t say, he couldn’t hold on to the thought. His blood was still roaring inside his veins in a fever it hadn’t reached in ages. He was burning, _burning up_ , and it was _so hard to breathe. Crushing._  
Sky and ground flipped their wrong positions back upright and his side crashed into something solid, like the hull of a boat. And just like that he felt like crying, and the world was wet. He tried to make a run for it, break through the murky stream roaring over his head, but he was stopped by firm hands. Hands of steel and iron and cold blade.

It wasn’t the staff, it couldn’t be, he hadn’t held it - he didn’t still, of that he was fairly certain, trying to open and close his hands. Either he was seeing wrong, or his hands had turned translucent. He couldn’t stop them from shaking.  
The residue was there, it was always there, but never like this. Never so that he went blind from light and the world swam by.  
He could feel every slandering word and every cut on him with each violent heartbeat. His hands ached and throbbed to the very bone but all other sense of touch disappeared. Walls were crashing down on him but there were no colours for him to latch onto, no gold sunshine or warm violet or garden green. Only quick flashes of red. Blood. Stabs of bright, searing blue. Lightning.  
_Thor._

And then he was caught up in a rapid, tumbling around a weightless world and hitting himself against rocks on his way. He could hear the howls of Geri and Freki and the deep, hollow cries of Father’s ravens.

What had they done to him, the men he’d fought before? _What in Hel?_  
Someone yanked him up, he could only feel steel and see bright light, no human face, but when he gasped for air and tried to hold onto the arms around him, the support disappeared again and something gave away against the ground like a snapping twig. He couldn’t push his hand against the ground like he wanted to, it refused to obey him. 

Someone spoke, but the voice was dulled. The floor was smooth and tiled and Loki tried to spread his palm flat against it, press his forehead against the cool surface. The colour was grey, devoid of all life. His nose was runny and he nearly choked when he tried to breathe through it. He drank blood and it tasted like copper and iron and bile.

 _What happened?_  
He didn’t know, all thought was slipping through his fingers.  
_Get up._

A strong heartbeat, a warm current he couldn’t fight against. He thought he saw Thor, but then he saw someone else, and shadows of river-horses lurking around, long necks and dark shapes waiting for him. Rare creatures. They swarmed around him, and perhaps he’d mounted a one in the mess, because he couldn’t stand up anymore. Sitting, he couldn’t hold his head up, but he couldn’t lift his hands to cradle it either.

 _Court ergi._  
_What?_  
The insult strangled him still. Like he was a dog to be beaten, like some common property, like he was a labouring slave to the gods, like a _harlot_ waiting for their commands and their hands and their mouths and their bodies upon his. Like he wouldn’t have been one of the most valuable members of the realm, of the people. His people. 

He was an important part.  
He was. His word had more weight in court than that of anyone else, save for his family. 

There was a moment when the world tumbled around again and something cracked, a sudden pain hit the back of his head, flaring to life like a torch. He cried out from the impact and tried to get away. His whole skull throbbed with pain for a brief moment.  
_How did you get out?_  
Then it all disappeared again, and even that grounding feeling fled from him.

Someone was shouting, someone was screaming, the wolves were barking again. He felt like he might have spoken too, or screamed, but he didn’t know what he said. 

Perhaps he was in Hel, facing Garm and hearing the cry of the blazing rooster behind the gates. The flashes of red colour and the cold white lights were the footsteps and hearths of the dead and soulless. 

No. He had to be home. He had to earn the soft kisses and smiles and love and promises he’d borrowed and stolen and taken. He had to apologise and deliver to mother what he owed her. Where had Thor gone? _Mother, please._ He didn’t mean to lose Thor.

His throat burned and he saw hands again, felt like blood and bile were rising up through his nose again. He saw a knife. 

No. Not that.

Gasping for a breath to scream and choking were not working together. He blinked hard, or so he thought before the world spinned again. Shaking his head. He didn’t want the knife closer. He couldn’t push it away. His face was wet again, mouth and nose and eyes all weeping, the dimmed hate in his veins trying to flare up again but morphing into terror. It was something living and squirming that wanted to crawl up.

 _You’re going to start talking or this is going down your throat._  
Yes, of course he would, _yes, yes, of course_ , as long as the knife was going _away, not here, no, keep it away from me_.

/ / / /

“Captain Rogers, god help me, you’re going to get him in that chair!” an agent called from behind the reinforced window on the other side of the room. Sitwell? Yeah.

Steve swallowed and clamped his jaw shut. Barton already had a black eye, and despite the armor Tony hadn’t been able to keep hold of the thrashing, trembling mess that Loki had become after the sedative took hold. Seven men had swarmed in through the doors and pointed their weapons at the man sprawled on the floor. 

A sedative. That’s what they had said. That’s what he’d thought he had shot this man with. 

The wrist Randolph had managed to twist had made an even uglier sound and bent past what it should have, when Loki had tried to catch his fall. He hadn’t made a sound - Tony had, just looking at it - so maybe it worked as a painkiller. But it was not a damn sedative if it made someone like Loki look like…  
Well, whatever it looked like when someone was shaking violently, head and useless hands pressed against concrete tiles, nosebleed and spit and vomit dripping down his face.

“What happened?” he heard Coulson ask Sitwell when he stormed inside. They muted their microphone.

“Okay,” he whispered to himself and took a step closer. A civilian on their team was bruised black and Loki was neutralised for a while, even if he hadn’t meant for this to happen. He crouched down and pressed Loki’s arms tightly against the man’s ribs before trying to yank him up. No need to get an elbow to the eye if Loki decided to flinch.  
“Get up”, Steve said in a low voice. It was like trying to hoist up a moose calf. Loki managed a short moment of enough motor control that he latched onto Steve’s arms and stared at him with wild eyes.

Wrestling him onto a chair and into the restraints wasn’t a struggle after that, but Steve found his own hands fumbling when Loki yanked his limp wrist weakly in the restraints.

“Rogers, Stark, you’re dismissed,” Coulson called, mic live again.  
“I’d rather not,” Stark said. Steve frowned at him.  
“What,” he whispered, earning a glare from Barton.  
“I don’t trust you any more than him,” Stark said out loud to all the agents. Loki’s head rolled back against the chair and on his shoulder. Every agent was standing alert again, but they weren’t looking at Loki. It made Steve’s throat dry.

“Mr. Stark, this is an order from your employer and commanding officer - get out. Rogers, you heard me.”  
“What are you going to do with him?” Steve asked.  
“Make him talk. And you two are going to stand guard by the door, make sure no one comes through,” Coulson said.  
“Like hell I am,” was all Tony snapped before storming through the crowd. 

It was Clint’s short look, the slightest shake of his head, that made Steve bend and shut his mouth. For a moment.  
“That’s not a sedative,” he said and turned to leave. Then he shut his mouth for real. 

He glanced over his shoulder and looked at Clint.  
“You’d better make sure it’s not going to be _me_ busting this door.” 

Okay, then he really shut up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry for the super long wait! Ragnarök threw me off guard with how much of my "far-reaching au" suddenly became canon-compliant. I had to reorganise my plans and read through what I had originally written.
> 
> I'm avoiding and denying the mess that is Infinity War so I decided it would be good to finally post the latest chapter! Thank you for all your comments and patience!


End file.
